Satellite Reign
Contains the game, original soundtrack, 'Satellite Reign: Reboot' e-book and 'The Art of Satellite Reign' e-book. Co-Op Multiplayer Play the entirety of Satellite Reign with your friends in co-op multiplayer. Up to four players can each control their own agent, opening up a whole new level of strategic and co-ordinated play. With full drop-in/drop-out support, LAN and Internet play, and customisable agent assignment, get ready to experience Satellite Reign like never before. Strategic Cyberpunk Action Satellite Reign is a real-time, class-based strategy game, set in an open-world cyberpunk city. You command a group of 4 agents through rain-soaked, neon-lit streets, where the law is the will of mega-corporations. Use your agents to sneak, shoot, steal, and sabotage your way up the corporate ladder, and take control of the most powerful monopoly of all time.
Steam User 31
I really love this game. Loved syndicate wars. Can see the developers put a lot of love and quality of content in it. I've really enjoyed it and even play it with my daughter. Were really into the cyberpunk genre stuff. Really wish there was dlc or some addon content. But if you devs see this i just want to say i appreciate your work very much thank you.
Steam User 29
Juicy Tips:
Purchase the Soldier's grenade skill ASAP. They're expensive early on but anyone can use grenades, ammunition is plentiful, and they destroy cover.
Focus on maxing out hacking and hardwiring early. It can be done before leaving downtown and lets you access every area.
First thing you should do in a new area is unlock the relay stations. They're your fast travel and respawn points.
Send everyone to infiltrate buildings, you'll get extra money or unique items depending on the mission. The description for banks makes it seem you have to choose but no, you can get the soldier bonus and hacker bonus.
Banks replenish money. I don't know what kind of timer it's on, probably less than 30 minutes real time, but revisit them every so often.
Finding researchers is a matter of chilling in a populated area with the world scanner turned on. Eventually you'll bump into a yellow NPC who can be bribed.
Perfect stealth is really difficult. There's no effective way to instantly kill enemies from afar. The key is to keep moving and not get cornered. Don't get into prolonged firefights. Kill enemies with "!" above their head before they raise the alarm. Try to divert enemy attention so they don't all flank your team. One trick is to have someone snipe cameras and retreat before the patrol comes. You can also hijack people or drones and send them running through a compound luring guards away.
The infiltrator's sword skill is amazing for stealth. Enemies usually patrol in groups and this ability instantly closes the distance with your target, putting you in range to kill nearby enemies.
Don't waste time building up a clone army from civilians. At level 2 hijack you can take over the simplest guards and they're basically three times better than civilians.
If you see an enemy calling for reinforcements, you can move one of your operatives close to him and then attack. The operative will kick the enemy before shooting, cancelling the reinforcement call.
You can also instantly interrupt a call for reinforcements with the hijack ability.
Team Stims on your Support is your "Pause and give orders" button. Upgrade it fast.
Hardwire is barely used and can be worked around with either explosives (or just lots of shooting), taking an alternate path, or forcing the skill with low probability and running away when someone comes to investigate if you fail. Remote explosives can be great for this if you have them.
Similarly, hacking is nowhere near as important as you might think. It's more commonly needed than hardwire and explosives don't often work as a replacement, but you can still brute-force with low skill. Although there's like two level 5 terminals in the first district, neither offers anything worth rushing hacking 5 for and you can come back later. Settle for 2-3 points in hacking and go grab lower level banking terminals in another district instead.
It's MUCH more important to rush hijack than hacking. Higher levels of hijack give you more goons, and lets you pick up higher level ones for more points (e.g. the aforementioned light soldier worth two civilians). Interrupting the highest level enemies can be hugely beneficial, even if you don't manage to complete the hijack. Higher level hijacks also give you clones with massive stat boosts. +70 energy on your infiltrator can let them stealth through even the biggest plazas.
Silencers do work and it's absolutely worth everyone having at least one silenced weapon. They greatly reduce the sound radius of the shots, drawing less attention, but don't seem to do jack about the giant laser beam or plasma gout coming out of your gun. Giving your infiltrator a silenced ballistic rifle weapon will let you snipe people once they have enough of the damage skills. A 'silenced' plasma smg not so much.
Cameras DO respawn. I think it takes about 30-60 minutes. By all means have a hijacked soldier run through a base shooting out cameras before you make your real run, just don't dawdle excessively. This is mostly noticeable for compounds you revisit for several diffferent runs. If you zone or load the game they also instantly respawn.
Civilian armies are great for setting off firefights on the other side of a base and drawing off patrols that might be approaching your guys, especially early on. Just be aware that they probably don't have clearance to be there and will probably be shot at even if they're not doing anything suspicious. Once you've got higher levels of hijack guards do work better, but three 5 second distractions is usually better than a single 10 second distraction.
Hijacks who haven't made themselves obvious to the opposition can also open doors for you without you having to hack/hardwire/explode them. Just have them stand in the middle of the thing whilst your team files through.
Put cloaking generators on your three non-infiltrators, and a remote hacking tool on your infiltrator. They'll help out a lot once you have the spare slots and cash available and actually let you keep your team together for stealth runs. Mobilty and option cybernetics (vents/jumping/etc) are also really good. As you say, you can't really rely on stealth without full mobility options or cloaking generators, some areas are just too open.
thanks
Steam User 16
Sometimes it's incredibly challenging, at least until you invest some extra time and realize there's another option that suits you better in the current situation.
If you feel like the game is punishing you, it's not. It wants you to learn more and rethink your strategy.
At one point, I was so frustrated that I uninstalled the game and tried to forget about it. However, its strong atmosphere drew me back and made it to the end.
Steam User 10
Satellite Reign is a worthy spiritual successor to Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, as it keeps everything that made these games such great cynical cyberpunk experiences, while adding modern gameplay ideas that meaningfully expand on the formula: Satellite Reign is set in a mostly contiguous open-world-ish city environment filled with lots of interactive environmental features that combine to create very dynamic gameplay scenarios. There are vents to use as shortcuts, power generators you can hardwire to deactivate connected devices, hackable computers that can turn turrets into allies, and much more. The game also gives you plenty of tools to interact with the world, from explosives and EMP grenades to portable invisibility generators. There’s a stealth system and a cover system, and in true Syndicate style you can research new gear, weapons, and implants or kidnap civilians to upgrade your drone agents.
Satellite Reign feels a lot like a top-down immersive sim, as these systems combine to give you lots of freedom to approach any given situation the way you want. The game supports this with its open-world-ish structure, with most missions only giving you a set goal (infiltrate a specific building in a restricted area of the city), and then letting you figure it out from there. You can pay informants to acquire useful information on your target (“there’s an electrocuted zipwire that’ll get you easy access to the area if you can first deactivate the power generator”) or do side quests to gain advantages (“assassinate a specific civilian to get the access codes to a door in the target area”). Once you feel prepared enough, you can make your way to your target in whatever way you wish, as the large open maps are all designed to allow for many different approaches. But naturally, the hard part is getting out of the lion’s den after the deed…
As far as I’m concerned, this is what makes Satellite Reign such a brilliant successor to Syndicate Wars. After the initial tutorial, the game is entirely player-driven. You’re just given an idea of useful targets in the cyberpunk city and you can decide whether to go for it or do something else. Need some money to fund your research? Just rob a bank (in the game!) or hack ATMs to siphon off a regular income. You’re planning to infiltrate a big military base and you just know you won’t be able to stay stealthy? Use your hacker to mind-control a bunch of cops, then use them to attack the guards in another area of the base as a distraction. Or just provoke the different factions of the city into fights with each other.
What’s perhaps most telling in regards to this open, player-driven design is that you could theoretically just walk straight from the tutorial area to the endgame area and finish the game, because there are no hard progression stops in the game, in the sense of “you have to do quests X and Y before the endgame area becomes accessible”. Sure, there will be tons of turrets, mechs and cybered-up guards in the way, but if you’re good enough, you might be able to bypass them even with the starting equipment. The game won’t artificially stop you from doing things like that, it’ll just have you face very challenging gameplay situations to entice you to prepare better for the final showdown.
Literally the only thing I can see potentially becoming an issue for some players here is the fact that the game can be a bit micro-management heavy and the controls may take some getting used to. Unlike the original Syndicate, your agents won’t eventually become unstoppable killing machines to the point where the game effectively plays itself – Satellite Reign still requires you to play well to succeed. When you get into fights, you not only have to take positioning and cover into account, but also stop your agents from shooting at nothing because their AI doesn’t realise there’s a wall between them and their target (the attack move command is much more reliable in this regard). There’re also lots of active abilities you can unlock via the skill system (the soldier can draw enemy fire, the infiltrator can turn invisible and so on), and you’ll need to make good use of them, because it’s very easy even for hardened agents to get overwhelmed as they’re spotted by a security camera and all the guards in the area start converging on you. If you don’t like that kind of pressure, the developers have patched in a way to start the game with the support agent’s time-slowing skill fully unlocked, so you can effectively play the game like a ‘real-time with pause’ game in the vein of Baldur’s Gate.
I’ve loved Satellite Reign every time I’ve played it since release, as it’s one of those games that’s built from the ground up to put you in charge, just like the original Thief or most other games on the immersive sim spectrum. In a typical gameplay session, you’ll buy information about the tech you can steal from the local corporate headquarters, infiltrate the area through a hacked backdoor, deactivate the CCTV system and get your prize. But then, a guard spots you on the way out and raises the alarm, which wakes up a nearby mech standing between you and your exfiltration point. So you get out your guns and improvise an escape plan, as more and more guards start putting the pressure on you. You finally blow up a gate at the exit of the restricted area which your hacker isn’t experienced enough to hack yet, only to find yourself getting spotted by cops and cameras on the city streets. So you have your hacker hijack a guard or two and use them as disposable puppets to cover your escape. In Satellite Reign, pulse-pounding shootouts and thrilling stealth infiltrations happen not because the developers scripted them into the game, but because of how you chose to approach the situation and how you used the game’s systems. That makes it incredibly satisfying to pull off a dynamic heist or even a flawlessly silent infiltration, knowing you’ve got no one to thank for it but yourself.
If you have a love for Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, or just enjoy systems-centred, player-driven gameplay in mechanically believable microcosms, there’s no excuse not to at least try Satellite Reign. By now, it’s old enough to frequently be on sale with a significant discount, and I promise you: Even at full price, this game is still well worth it!
Steam User 9
The spiritual successor to Syndicate Wars in every way.
Steam User 7
I became a backer basically as soon as I learned about Satellite Reign, being a fan of Syndicate and Syndicate Wars.
At first, when it came out, I played basically only the tutorial, and it seemed a bit complex for my tastes. I put off playing it for a long time, but always intented to come back to it at some point. That point came a few weeks ago. And I was kinda hooked. It's not *exactly* Syndicate, but definitely has the Syndicate DNA, while feeling a lot more modern.
The missions could use a little more variety, like involving cars. However, there have been a few escort missions, which I usually dread, because, you know, escort missions. But here, the escortees do what you tell them to, and thus can stay hidden somewhere until the coast is clear. Although, the "select all agents" button selects hi-jacked and escortees as well; I missed two buttons to select either only the main team or everyone except them.
Gameplay is great. Sneaking from hiding spot to hiding spot or grilling everyone with plasma cannons and laser beams is satisfying. Or having the infiltrator use their silenced sniper rifle to pick off enemies one by one.
Graphics are done very well. It's a slightly cartoonish look. And it offers all a Blade Runner expects: night time, wet streets, bright neon lights, holographic trees, futuristic cars, and lots of people wandering around. It's well readable, too. Terminals, Cameras, Enemies are easily spotted.
Sounds and music are also done nicely and fit the game.
The story is told in text a lot, voice overs a little. I didn't read a lot of it, but I probably should have. The ending caught me off guard regardless, and I liked it.
In retrospect, I should've played this a long time ago. It's really good. And triggers the "just one more mission" effect.
Steam User 4
Syndicate :)