Satellite Reign Review

Still, I wish that the tight spots I ended up in didn't so often feel like somebody else's fault entirely. Agents feel sluggish and slow to respond to your inputs, as if their cybernetic brains are receiving commands via the NBN, which is a bit of a problem when security consists of more than one rusting cyborg and his overly-aggressive Roomba. The game shows you what positions everybody will take up if you click 'move' on a given location, but actually getting them to take up the positions you specifically want - that is, ones where your pillock of a fourth agent isn't left standing around with his head poking out - is an unreliable and fiddly process suitable only for watchmakers and people who milk spiders for a living. And what about interactive elements? Whether it's a terminal, a hardware panel or the back of an unsuspecting guard's cranium, if your agent isn't precisely positioned correctly for the action then they'll just stand around sucking their cybernetic thumb until they decide to reorient themselves. Maybe it seems odd to nitpick over such tiny control quirks in what is functionally an RTS, but it's a matter of focus: a moment of hesitation that might've otherwise made a few zerglings late to the space marine buffet could instead mean overtime at the cloning vats (or worse, a trip to the quickload screen) .

But let's talk about upgrades. The story, for lack of a better word, is essentially about building up your four agents until they're strong enough to kick down Dracogenics' front door and clean the place out like it ain't no thing, and the game's upgrade cycle neatly reflects this: you break into compounds, steal their prototype technology - that is to say, you conduct tactical espionage operations, mm hmm - research how to replicate it and then use it to help break into the tougher compounds just down the road. It's a fine way of organically gating progress, and like just about everything else in the game, you have plenty of freedom to equip your squad as you see fit. Of course, that doesn't always mean deciding how to build them is a brain-buster or anything; grenades can wipe a small army off the map, medical wands can instantly heal an agent from halfway across the screen, and if you're like me - terrible at any strategy game where you can’t stop for a cup of tea between each move - then the future-steroids that put everything into slow-motion are an absolute godsend. Compare that to a new gun that does slightly more damage to armoured enemies, or a head augmentation that gives you a meager health bonus, and it’s just not the same kind of utility.

On the other hand you have the scanner, which is really just too useful. At the push of a button, without any energy drain or penalty, your support will scan his or her surroundings, allowing you to identify people of interest, see the city's cabling underfoot, and pick out interactive elements from the fluorescent multicoloured jumble of the city streets. While this is undoubtedly useful, and looks cool to boot - overlaying wireframes onto everything like your agents just cut a hole in the space-time continuum and stepped into the level editor - it has the same problem as Batman's detective-vision and Garrett's edgy-goth-lord-vision in the sense that there’s no practical reason not to just wander around with it on all the time. Maybe it's unfair to pick on Satellite Reign out of all the games that do this, but really, why? Hiding information away like this until I press a button isn't engaging or challenging; it's just an extra step that lets you get away with less readable visual design. The only interesting feature at work is when what you can see is limited by the scanner's radius, forcing you to get creative in order to work out where a gas main leads or where the control panel for a camera is hiding, but it hardly comes up often enough to justify building a whole system around it.

Then there's the whole business of the game being technically a sandbox. Unsurprisingly, it comes with the sandbox requisite avalanche of doodads to hunt down in between expeditions into enemy strongholds - ATMs to hack, revive beacons to set up, lore snippets to download, researchers to coerce - but they're all valuable enough to make finding them feel like a worthwhile task rather than a meaningless Ubisoft collect-a-thon. What's more interesting is how the continuous open world - well, almost continuous; it's divided into four zones for pacing reasons - adds so much to the process of getting into somebody's complex and stealing their secret tech. Now that literally everybody else on the planet has logged forty-something hours into The Phantom Pain I'm sure this seems like a moot point, but being able to work around the boundaries of hostile areas, locate hidden entrances, soften up points of entry and vanish into the market across the street all feel like wholly unique experiences that recognize the unsung joys of infiltration in an environment that doesn't just stop at the boundary wall. Getting one character to blast open the service entrance and flee while the rest of your squad lean against the wall and whistle nonchalantly is a hilariously effective tactic, and the Hitman-esque relationship between restricted and neutral areas - wherein guards will escort agents outside as long as they're not doing anything too suspicious - leaves room open for all kinds of shenanigans that just wouldn't be there if you were simply dropping in from an overworld map. And once again, unexpected interactions between the game's systems make it feel so alive: I've seen compound guards getting into fights with street cops over an errant droid, civilians getting perforated by minigun fire for stumbling through the wrong door at a security checkpoint, even pursuers being thwarted by spontaneous traffic jams.

Satellite Reign is the kind of game I want to see more of. It’s open-ended, deep in strange places, remarkably atmospheric, and considering that the last game to resemble it came out in 1996, as close to unique as it’s going to get. It's not an especially stellar RTS, nor is its stealth much to write home about, but it redeems itself as a creator of moments: stories of last-stand shootouts, operations going thoroughly awry, AI quirks and disorganized escapes. Moments that happen because of how you approach your tasks and the degree to which you thoroughly botch them, not because somebody wrote a thing dictating how they were going to play out. So give it a shot, why don't you, before all those moments are lost... like tears in the rain.