14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone remembers EA’s Syndicate reboot launched back in 2012 and developed by Starbreeze, but few good things can be said about this attempt to bring back a beloved franchise and give it a new look and feel.
First of all, Syndicate was a first-person shooter, which wasn’t something that fans of series appreciated. Bullfrog’s Syndicate series is an isometric real-time, top-down shooter game with strategy elements, while EA’s title was of a completely different genre.
Luckily, the folks over at 5 Lives Studios thought Syndicate fans deserved a worthy sequel, which should be in the first genre. The idea was given a name, Satellite Reign and put on Kickstarter where it got funded and then some.
The game was successfully funded on Kickstarter on July 2013 and developers promised Satellite Reign would be released on PC in December 2014.
As promised, the 5 Lives Studio have released Satellite Reign, but only as an Early Access Game, which means they still have a lot of work to pour into the game.
Obviously, all backers have free access to this early build of the game, but before jumping into action let’s recap what you’d get if you decided to purchase Satellite Reign so early into development.
First of all, only one district is available, but more will be added as the game’s development progresses. Also, there are a lot of bugs that you’ll encounter and there will, of course, be some balancing issues that will most certainly be fixed in future updates.
Lots of the systems in the game, which are currently being developed, have been disabled until they become worthy of being included. So, even though you’ll notice systems like Cloning and Research, they are not functional for the moment.
Basically, you can only rampage through one district, do some missions and send bug reports to developers, because there are a lot of those.
The pre-alpha build gives you control of three agents: support, infiltrator and hacker. A fourth class, soldier is part of the game as well. You are given a certain amount of money you can use to customize the loadout of your agents.
The game does not have any tutorials, so the only way to understand how to play Satellite Reign is by trial and error and a few load screens from the beginning of the game that show you the list of controls and some of the basic actions.
While I have found the game playable enough considering this is a pre-alpha build, there are some bugs that kind of ruined the experience for me, like the inability to get out of the car. This doesn’t always happen, but it does happen often enough.
Also, there were times when my car starts flipping around in the same spot and I can’t get my agents out. It looks like the cars in the game are the weak spot, so I suggest staying away of those until an update fixes some of the issues.
Apart from that Satellite Reign shows promise. The battles are all real-time and there’s no pause implemented yet. I’m not sure there will be such a feature included, but I would not have any issues if skipped.
From what I know, the game will include a special ability that will allow players to slow down time, so I guess developers won’t bother adding a Pause feature as well.
Depending on your play style, you can take on various missions the hard way (rampage) or take a more stealthy approach. Each of your agents will get new abilities as you level up becoming more powerful.
The look and feel definitely remind me of Bullfrog’s Syndicate series, so even if Satellite Reign is still in early stages of development, I strongly recommend fans of the original game to keep a close eye on this one, I will surely do so.
