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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!