REVIEW

Satellite Reign Review

by Sam Foxall, August 24th, 2015

Satellite Reign puts you in the role of a leader of a criminal syndicate, fighting its way through a cyberpunk city and trying to overthrow the evil megacorp that controls every aspect of human life. Does this spiritual successor to Syndicate fight the power or should it have stayed in hiding?

First off, some full disclosure. I was not a backer of Satellite Reign when it was on Kickstarter and this copy of the game was provided by the developers. I have absolutely no background with the Syndicate series as a whole, besides knowing from people that the reboot of it was awful, so I have no attachment to the series whatsoever. I do like cyberpunk and am a huge fan of squad based, tactical RPGs so Satellite Reign did seem right up my neon lit, rain soaked alley. Unfortunately, a combination of rubbish controls, questionable world and mission layout and a real lack of identity made me dream of electric sheep during my time spent with the game.

So, what’s the setup for Satellite Reign? The answer is not a whole lot. Besides a brief intro cutscene which tells you about the megacorp Dracogenics and all the nasty things they done to the world, you are dropped into the shoes of a criminal who is hell bent on overthrowing this corporation through any means necessary. Past this intro and the occasional bit of chatter from your crew back at underground criminal HQ, the story is very much on the backburner during your time with Satellite Reign. Seeing as your squad is all randomly generated and made up of cloned humans (we’ll get to this system later), you feel no attachment to your squad or feel that they have been at all affected by Dracogenics and all the other horrible things that exist in this world. This would be somewhat alleviated if the world itself was interesting but it is the most boilerplate, samey cyberpunk world that you’ve seen over and over. If you have seen Blade Runner, played Deus Ex or read anything by Philip K Dick, you’ve been in the world of Satellite Reign before. You get the giant neon signs advertising some technobabble, thousands of strip clubs and seedy shops as well as steam rising from every other bloody vent in the floor. It completely lacks its own identity and honestly feels like a half arsed Blade Runner game.

What adds to this problem is that the bustling city is actually lifeless. When you first step into the world after the initial tutorial, Satellite Reign’s city seems full of activity. There are loads of crowds walking about, cars driving and music blasting as you skulk round the landscape so it feels like a living, breathing place. Then you notice that you never hear any background chatter from the NPCs or reactions from them besides running away if you pull your gun out. You can’t go into any of these shops or dens of iniquity and the music outside every club is exactly the same. Cars always stop when you cross the road and they have a tendency to get stuck in junctions and start doing donuts for eternity.

Look at all the colours maaaaaan.

The city then goes from a seemingly living entity, to filler as you trek from Compound to Compound in order to complete missions. Even then, you eventually cut out the walking once you have unlocked a region’s fast travel points and clicked all the interactable objects that aren’t part of a quest line. The only time you will probably just walk around Satellite Reign’s city is to hijack someone to be added to your collection of clones, which form the basis of the game’s respawn system. Cloning has been perfected and the singularity has been achieved, meaning that humans can upload their consciousness into a computer and then effectively download it into a new body. Humans have made a way to become essentially immortal, which is an intriguing concept but is utilised as an irritating respawn method.

If you die multiple times, your clone template starts to atrophy, bestowing you negative status ailments and forcing you to go body snatch some poor civilian to buff your stats up again. It also stops you from really customising your squad’s look, as you cannot alter the appearance of clones besides what fluorescent trenchcoat they wear or the colour of their gasmask. An opportunity to explore what it would be like to basically mix and match human body parts to create the perfect looking human, just to throw them in the bin after they lose their combat effectiveness, is not really tapped into during the main quest. Chances to really dive into the effects this dystopian world would have on people are really missed, which is a major shame as the best cyberpunk experiences are all about dealing with ideas of the human condition in these bleak futurescapes.

So, let’s finally get to the gameplay of Satellite Reign. While the game is presented initially as this sweeping city you need to explore and liberate, you soon realise it is just a series of self-contained levels which once you complete, you will never return to. Areas in the city are split between Compounds and civilian areas. Civilian areas are where you can harvest clones, siphon money from cash machines and bribe certain NPCs for intel about Compounds you will infiltrate. The Compounds act as the main meat of the game, with missions usually revolving around finding intel about each area, sneaking in and getting to the goal inside before exfiltrating out. The way they set up each mission is quite effective, with every mission having a set of tasks you can complete to help make your infiltration easier for you. You can unlock side entrances for Compounds, learn what loot you’ll find inside by paying your information broker or you can go in blind and try to complete your task with no additional help. There are multiple ways to tackle a mission which is great for players who want to be more creative in their approach but sadly, Satellite Reign does not effectively reward players for trying different tactics.

While you can go in stealthily, using all your squad’s unique skills to sneak past guards and bypass security cameras, you get hardly any XP for being quiet. The only reliable way to level up your squad is by killing enemies, which seems to defeat the object of having multiple degrees of choice to completing a mission. I could sneak into a compound, not kill a single guard and escape with the plans for a weapon in hand but I would get little to no experience for it, thus making my efforts seem worthless. However, if I stormed into the base with guns out and basically murdered my way through hordes of enemy soldiers, I’d go up about 5 levels. It negates most of the cool abilities your squad has and boils the most rewarding strategy to killing everything in sight.

Once you break into a bunch of compounds and get money flowing, you’ll be able to outfit a small army.

It also doesn’t help that half of your squad is pretty much useless to start. You control 4 characters in Satellite Reign, being the Soldier, the Support, the Infiltrator and the Hacker. The Infiltrator and the Hacker are incredibly useful in game and are pretty much required for every mission, while the Support and Solider take ages to become useful in combat, with the Support’s main use in the early game being to simply point out things that the Hacker can hack into. The Hacker’s ability to disable security cameras, hack enemy drones and bypass door locks make him absolutely essential while the Infiltrator’s stealth and kill power turns him into a killing machine who can ghost past a whole patrol of guards. There is a complete imbalance in the usefulness of each squad member and even if you are using the squad abilities, you aren’t rewarded for using them to be stealthy but to kill things.

You can at least customise squad abilities to a large degree and there is a great art into crafting your syndicate to be the best it can be. There is a back end to managing your crime organisation as well, with you being able to send weapons and items you find in Compounds back to your R&D team for replication or you can equip them to a squad member straight away. The only cost is that you will lose that item if your squad member dies in battle so there is some decision as to whether you whisk that new pistol off to the boffins in the lab or go cap some guards with it. However, this research system feels incredibly hands off, with there being no tangible evidence of your syndicate really growing, besides you getting a bit more money every minute from your hacked ATMs or weapon research taking less time. Just having something as basic as a live map showing your syndicate’s growing control over the city or a graphic of your researchers at work would go a long way to making the impact of your actions feel powerful.

I will say that when everything does click into place on rare occasion, Satellite Reign feels great. Sneaking past guards unnoticed, placing your squad in the most optimal locations and using their abilities in tandem to get in and out of a Compound is super satisfying. Unfortunately, not only are you not rewarded adequately for using this synergy for stealth, the chance of this co-ordination is once in a blue moon due to the game’s dodgy pathfinding and stupid decision to be in real time instead of turn based.

In most games which require a lot of stealth, being in complete control of your character is absolutely paramount when one wrong move can mean you effectively fail the mission. So, imagine the absolute frustration when you have to control 4 characters in real time who often don’t go the way you commanded and stumble into a guard patrol and get gunned down in a matter of seconds, booting you back to the start of the Compound. Combine that with the lack of an ability to save in a Compound and that even if you do save, loading that save back up teleports you back to the nearest Relay Beacon rather than having you appear exactly where you saved and you have a recipe for computers flying out windows. Now, this could be easily fixed if combat was turn-based like XCOM or Shadowrun, meaning that even if you did fluff a movement command, it didn’t mean instant death or if there was a live pause feature like in Dragon Age, where you could pause action and issue attack or movement commands to be enacted when you unpause. These would go a hell of a long way to reduce the frustration of Satellite Reign’s combat but at the moment, it never feels like you are ever really in control while playing.

I doubt they have a farmer’s market every weekend at this city.

Presentation wise, Satellite Reign is just okay. Again, the city feels like every cyberpunk city since Blade Runner, with there being no standout visual designs which have Satellite Reign standing shoulder to shoulder with a series like Deus Ex. The music is equally as forgettable, sporting the usual synth beats that you’ve heard ten times over. You’re better off just turning the music off completely and playing the Blade Runner soundtrack in the background as you’ll probably have a more pleasurable listening experience. As for performance, Satellite Reign does run very well, even on mid-range laptops like the one I’m unfortunately saddled with. It did have the problem of seemingly freezing every time I loaded up a save but when actually running, the game did run at a very consistent frame rate with no noticeable drops.

For me, Satellite Reign is a prime example of when pleasing your fans and trying to add new features results in an experience which is ultimately focused on nothing. Nothing about the game stands out as really well done, just feeling like a complete hodge-podge of mechanics, visual styles and control systems which have been put together create something that never quite fits to make a cohesive whole. Syndicate fans probably backed Satellite Reign so they’ve already made a decision on what they think but for everyone else, Satellite Reign is currently a chore to play. On the rare moments that the stars align and everything works, it is a standout stealth experience but most of the time, it is either dull or infuriating to play.