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KickStarter Satellite Reign - Syndicate Wars spiritual successor from original devs

likaq

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2009
Messages
1,198
I'm not sure why you think posting a video where someone blows away the surface from under a building yet that building still remains standing is going to help your argument.

He blow away maybe 1% of surface under the building, rest of surface damage was far away and deep underground was so it is perfectly ok that building still remains.
 

Athelas

Arcane
Joined
Jun 24, 2013
Messages
4,502
Can you actually level structures by blowing away the underlying surface? I don't think you can, although my memories of the first Red Faction are a bit hazy.

Being able to collapse fixed set pieces is cool
I wouldn't describe every structure in an open-world game as 'fixed set pieces'.
 

Haba

Harbinger of Decline
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Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
And everything surrounding them is indestructible like in every other game out there. Guerilla sure did accomplish something, but it is a completely different thing from the original. That hasn't been done since. In Red Faction it was quite limited, so one would expect that ten years later something like that would be an automatic feature... but nah.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
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This was a good effort, and the PC gamer review definitely captures my sentiments.

The game lacks something, something special. The combat - which is supposed to be the crux of this genre, feels really clunky, slow, and lackluster, not very syndicaty.

No destructionable environment is really really a let down, and several of the stretch goals were not implemented (fully modifiable cyborg screen) .. the fucking originals had this.. how can they not have that?

The sound design is really dull and boring, bordering on terrible. The weapon sounds don't have any "oopmhf" and there's no voice-over when selecting stuff, little details like this, is what made the originals great.

Overall I can't help but feel slightly disappointed in this opportunity. Syndicate Wars and Syndicate still feels more fun and plays better than this successor.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Wot I Think: Satellite Reign

satrheader.jpg


When I consider Satellite Reign [official site] as a whole, a grand canvas spattered with raindrops, neon and bulletholes, I’m in love with it. Yes, it looks and feels a little like Syndicate, but 5 Lives’ Kickstarted RTS-RPG does not slavishly follow a model from the past. Its city is open, a series of district-hubs with opportunities and mission locations scattered across them, and there are many possible routes to victory.

Satellite Reign is, from the wide-scan satellite’s view, a thing of beauty and promise. But I’ve been down in the streets for the last few days to take a closer look at the city. Here’s wot I think.



To be wholly immune to the big picture of this cyberpunk cityscape, you’d have to be indifferent to the influences that are fused into the environment. Syndicate, yes, but also Gibson, Bladerunner, Mœbius and Otomo. It’s natural that a game set within a city that is such a convincing rendition of electric dreams made solid would instantly appeal to a huge swathe of those who have grown up with or recently embraced these particular flavours of science fiction.

Considered from street-level, where the citizens as well as the city itself must convince, Satellite Reign isn’t quite as impressive. My team of agents look more like the crowd of thirty-something punk-by-night office workers who were hanging onto their youth by hanging around with teenagers at Jilly’s Rockworld back in the day. Over-eager cosplayers looking to make their outfits pop rather than corporate agents engaging in a bloody battle for supremacy. That’d be fine if their dress sense helped them to mingle with the crowd but most inhabitants of Reign’s city look like drones rather than disco-goths.

It’s a small pill to swallow, that disconnect between place and (Hiro) protagonists, but together with some of the more fiddly aspects of the tactical combat and stealth, it prevented Satellite Reign from settling down as smoothly as I had hoped it would. As with the aesthetics, the widescreen, zoomed out view is of a game I admire, but the finer details are often frustrating and repetitive. The hours I’ve spent with it have been mostly enjoyable but many of the minutes within those hours have been spent on a form of autopilot.

satr5.jpg


At those times – when I feel I’m going through motions that I’ve learned rather than reacting to the motions of the AI and the setup of the security forces – Satellite Reign feels amiable rather than tense or exhilarating. There’s a comfort zone to be found in the calm between missions and even the occasional infiltration can seem like a sedate by-the-numbers operation. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of anxiety as the security of a site rises and hacked cameras tick back into action, but the more I play, the more often I find myself making challenges for myself, either by leaving members of my crew behind or setting artificial limits on the equipment and augs I’ll use on a specific mission.

The beauty of the game is that it allows you to play however you fancy. Want to take a solitary agent on a bank job using nothing but hacking skills and a silenced pistol? Smashing. And maybe you’d like to kick in the front door of a rival corp’s headquarters and mow every guard and employee down with a quartet of heavy weapons? As long as your eventual goal involves murder and/or theft, the city is your oyster, and you are Walrus and Carpenter Incorporated.

satr2.jpg


Satellite Reign is almost as much an open world urban crime game as a cyberpunk corp-war simulator. Your main mode of expression, as CEO-Commander of your agents, involves robbery, targeting ideas as well as cash. An introductory video, in the form of a news-flash montage, tried to make me care about the various entities and technologies of the world, but I found myself attached to the reference points rather than the creation itself. The central concept that differentiates this possible future from the others that it resembles is a form of information age resurrection technology, fused into the game’s mechanics through the presence of Relay Beacons. They’re checkpoint, respawn point, shop and equipment storage centre rolled into a single location, and they function as a link to the always off-screen HQ that supplies, trains and rebuilds your agents. Those agents are always either in the city or dead. If you decide to work solo, or with anything less than the full squad of four, the agents left behind will stand in the street waiting. They have no home.

I didn’t get along with the respawning. It’s not that it makes the game too easy; as I’ve already mentioned, the flexibility of approach allows for on the fly modification of the difficulty level. Being able to download an agent’s build into a replica body after ‘death’ reduces the consequences of risks taken though, and also reduced my attachment to individual characters. Even though there are plenty of ways to mould each agent, they neatly slot into classes and I came to treat them more as highly specialised and powerful RTS-style units rather than characters.

satr3.jpg


A function of the open world and Relay Beacons is to make all things disposable. There’s rarely an impetus to act and while it’s easy to appreciate the breathing room when there’s such a rich location to explore during downtime, I found myself in need of distractions. Even late in the game, I didn’t feel as if my success or failure had any real impact – agents respawn, districts go on much as they were before the bullets flew, and missions are separate constructs, plugged into but outside the city.

Picking and choosing equipment before heading into a mission area is compelling and the interface mostly works beautifully to support whatever approach is chosen. Agents attach to cover and the UI informs you as they do so, a predictive overlay on the screen helping to ensure that a slight misclick won’t ruin your day. Combat involves a few too many bullet-sponges for my liking but I understand and appreciate the reasoning – the ability to endure exposure to gunfire allows for tactical adjustments during shoot-outs, as well as preventing every failed attempt at stealth from ending in immediate disaster.

satr1.jpg


Perhaps it’s greedy to wish that such a beautiful city was more reactive and that my own actions in it would leave persistent signs of change. I referred to it as a canvas at the start of this review and that’s precisely how I came to think of it – it exists to be acted upon and its inner workings are only evident where they directly impact on your efforts. Mostly. There are occasional interactions between police and citizens but the people of the world, like the invisible rabbit-hole interiors, exist to serve a function rather than to create a sense of credible chaos.

Like its interface and design, Satellite Reign’s city is a far cleaner and more controlled place than it first seems. Efficiency rules over emergent accident and emergency, and the game is tight and well-crafted. My favourite moments involved tense tactical infiltrations, using every agent’s skillset to temporarily disable cameras and locks. At its best, Satellite Reign has more in common with Commandos than Syndicate. It’s a splendid construct, built to endure and to sustain repeated playthroughs in various styles, but I can’t shake the feeling that, minute by minute, a little more chaos and unpredictability would go a long way.
 

zeitgeist

Magister
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Aug 12, 2010
Messages
1,444
I still can't get over the fact that nobody seems to care about the lack of environmental destruction
I care now that I found out about it. What's the complete list of missing features from Syndicate/Wars that this doesn't have? So far there's:
  • environmental destruction*
  • fully modifiable cyborg screen
Does it at least have persuadertrons?

* - I checked their Kickstarter page and apparently the env. destruction stretch goal has been funded but it's still not in the game? Really?
 

Haba

Harbinger of Decline
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Codex 2012 MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2
Welp, like quite a few (pre)reviews have said, it really is more of Commandos than Syndicate. Sneaking around, hacking shit. Personally I prefer going in guns blazing and causing massive collateral damage. Not really the thing here.
 

Daedalos

Arcane
The Real Fanboy
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Yes.. the environmental destruction stretch goal was reached, but it has NOT been implemented into the game due to "ressource-cost" and "problematic-implementation"
 
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I care now that I found out about it. What's the complete list of missing features from Syndicate/Wars that this doesn't have? So far there's:
  • environmental destruction*
  • fully modifiable cyborg screen
Does it at least have persuadertrons?

* - I checked their Kickstarter page and apparently the env. destruction stretch goal has been funded but it's still not in the game? Really?

i don't want to even try this game anymore.
this is a sad world we live in.
 

Delbaeth

Learned
Joined
Nov 21, 2013
Messages
320
Don't want environmental destruction if it isn't implemented correcly.

While Syndicate Wars had very nice things, I thought destruction was too much, I didn't want to play an action game Canon Fodder-Desert Strike-like.

5 Lives can take to time to implement that, or not. I don't care but I may be surprised.
 

zeitgeist

Magister
Joined
Aug 12, 2010
Messages
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I played the first few missions now, they seem to be very stealth-focused and combat is clearly supposed to be cover-based. So far it's all been about avoiding roaming guards and moving security cameras, staying out of sight, and disabling various security panels and such. Didn't notice a cryo chamber (edit: there's a clone system where you find new clone bodies through hijacking people), when some of the agents died they just respawned with XP loss, seems like there's just 4 agents with preset classes and that's it.

Also, apparently there are no Persuadertrons at all, only a hacker skill that works on a single person (possibly more with upgrades, no massive mobs though), and it seems like there's no large-scale carnage. I might be wrong, maybe you're able to eventually mow down everyone while running with upgraded skills or something, but it doesn't look very promising.
 
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tormund

Arcane
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Aug 15, 2015
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Penetrating the underrail
So this turned out to be exact opposite of Syndicate's framerate killing mass mayhem? :D I didn't follow this game that much, but some of their gameplay vids looked promising, and great majority of user reviews on Steam were positive.
 

Telengard

Arcane
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Nov 27, 2011
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The end of every place
I still can't get over the fact that nobody seems to care about the lack of environmental destruction, I mean the vast majority of gaming "journalists" obviously never played SWARS but backers of Satellite Reign and Codexers!?
I would have cared, but environmental destruction has no business being a kickstarter stretch goal. That it was there turned me off from the start. ED is a furnace that eats money, and the more detailed the environment, the bigger the furnace. There's a reason environmental destruction is currently the realm of voxel games.

If you see anyone promising that as a stretch goal again, know that it's so unlikely to happen that you can pretty much guarantee that that feature is dead in the water, and immediately add a layer of distrust for the project at project management level. For budget-tier games, if the game's not voxel, ED needs to be a part of the initial design and a core element of gameplay design or it ain't happening.
 

zeitgeist

Magister
Joined
Aug 12, 2010
Messages
1,444
Played a bit more and upgraded the agents somewhat, the cyber augmentation system has 4 slots (head/body/arms/legs), I didn't notice any changes on the model, no Leonardo device, nothing like that.

The missions... well, I'm not entirely sure if I'm playing them wrong, or if they're just designed that way, but the flow just seems weird. Since the places you're infiltrating have a mix of stealth, cover combat, switching things on and off, avoiding cones of vision etc. (and the "solutions" are reasonably obvious, just tricky to accomplish), ideally you'd rarely be doing one single thing at a time, the agents are supposed to be in different places and do their signature actions simultaneously or in sequence. It's a very RTwP-like design but without pausing, it's sort of like Commandos that way I guess.

In practice, however, when a stealth attempt goes pear-shaped, the game quickly devolves into blob combat. This is finally a feature it has in common with Syndicate, which was often quite blobby, except this time it's much worse since it's cover blob combat, where you position the entire squad behind a single cover (they're usually 4+ spaces long) and kill mobs until they stop coming.

One of the agents actually has a time-slowing skill, which I think is meant to be used as a sort of a pause button, I'm not sure how slow it gets when it's fully upgraded. If this is meant as a must-have skill, this would explain the RTwP-like level/encounter design.
 
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m_s0

Arcane
Joined
Jun 18, 2009
Messages
1,289
Reading all these first impressions I'm really glad I had low expectations for this game.
 

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,887
Played a bit more and upgraded the agents somewhat, the cyber augmentation system has 4 slots (head/body/arms/legs), I didn't notice any changes on the model, no Leonardo device, nothing like that.

The missions... well, I'm not entirely sure if I'm playing them wrong, or if they're just designed that way, but the flow just seems weird. Since the places you're infiltrating have a mix of stealth, cover combat, switching things on and off, avoiding cones of vision etc. (and the "solutions" are reasonably obvious, just tricky to accomplish), ideally you'd rarely be doing one single thing at a time, the agents are supposed to be in different places and do their signature actions simultaneously or in sequence. It's a very RTwP-like design but without pausing, it's sort of like Commandos that way I guess.

In practice, however, when a stealth attempt goes pear-shaped, the game quickly devolves into blob combat. This is finally a feature it has in common with Syndicate, which was often quite blobby, except this time it's much worse since it's cover blob combat, where you position the entire squad behind a single cover (they're usually 4+ spaces long) and kill mobs until they stop coming.

One of the agents actually has a time-slowing skill, which I think is actually meant to be used as a sort of a pause button, I'm not sure how slow it gets when it's fully upgraded. If this is meant as a must-have skill, this would explain the RTwP-like level/encounter design.
From what I seen enemy likes to use cover as well and you can take single agents and find them flanking positions.
 

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