The Pew Pews and Boom Booms of Satellite Reign

    Satellite Reign was free at Humble Bundle recently, so I picked it up.  And now I've beaten it.  I have thoughts I want to share about it, so here they are.

   I'm going to preface this with a few things, first, so you know where I come from with this review:

1. Top-down games aren't usually my style.  I'm more of an FPS/RPG dude, and while this game does have RPG elements, namely XP, skill points, currency, and a variety of items and upgrades, the base gameplay isn't something I actively seek out.
2. I play on Linux.  There may be some issues I have that you don't, simply because the devs focus on the Windows version more.  Just be aware that some issues I may mention may not be in every version of the game.
3. I personally value gameplay above everything else by a very large margin.  I don't care about story, graphics, or audio unless they are done badly enough to impede my enjoyment of the gameplay or they are good enough to enhance it.

Presenting: The Presentation!

    The story is fairly minimal, and isn't anything to write home about.  A company has developed technology that allows people to respawn, like in a video game, and your task is to travel between the city's four districts, gather experience, gear, and upgrades, and kill the CEO of said company.  Short, sweet, and provides an in-game excuse for your ability to respawn.  Once you finish the tutorial, though, you are given the story very rarely.  You get a short message when you first enter a new district of the city, plus one when you reach the final area of the game, totaling maybe 6 total messages.  Even for me, that's very little, but I'd rather too little than too much.

    Graphically, though, I think the game is fairly good.  Enemies of the three factions are easy to tell from each other, thanks to their armor being solid red, white, or purple.  That also means that they are easy to tell from the environment, if the health bars didn't spell it out enough.  I find it difficult to tell lasers and bullets apart from each other in a firefight, but if you have the time to tell the difference, you aren't in a situation strenuous enough to need it.

One of the best things about the game's presentation?  Its explosions are pretty.

    The soundtrack is fairly good.  It doesn't stand out at all, but they definitely have the right style of music to go with the sci-fi style of the game as a whole.  It also has the nice feature of changing tracks on the fly to fit whether you're in combat or not, so you have the higher-energy track during the higher-energy parts, and a lower-energy one while you explore the city or are sneaking around a restricted area.

The sound effects are also good, but my god.  I don't know if I should consider the cacophony of sounds during a firefight a good or a bad thing.  It gets loud and definitely chaotic, to the point where I had to turn my system volume down a notch or two for comfort, compared to where I normally have it.  Good for getting across the idea that you are in DEEP, bad for your ears.  Yeah, let's leave it at that.

That's all well and dandy, but how does it play?

    The game is unique, I will give it that.  You control four characters in a top-down view of the world.  Think XCOM, but real-time instead of turn-based, and not tied to a grid.  You go into restricted areas, get your characters into a heavily guarded room, get out, and wait for the heat to die down.  Of course, this means you have a mix of stealth and pew-pew choices, and you can actually go from one to the other fairly easily, or even mix the two to an extent.  If you want to kill a guard, you can sneak behind them and deliver an instant-kill execution shot, which only alerts other guards if you are spotted or using an unsilenced weapon.  You can also start a firefight, which will only alert other guards if one manages to get a call out for reinforcements or they are close enough already to hear the gunfire.

    The way the game handles interactable objects is very nice.  Your Soldier and Hacker can each interact with certain things, like consoles, for various effects, like locking a door.  There is little more satisfying than pulling off an infiltration by turning the sentries against their owners, running through the door to the objective in the chaos, and disabling it from the other side to keep the enemies away for a little longer.  I mean it, the interactions in this game are genuinely cool to make use of.

    The variety in weapons and upgrades is fairly small, but still what I'd call good.  There are a decent variety of gun types, and there are also three categories those guns fall into: Ballistics, Laser, and Plasma.  Laser and Plasma excel at different things, while Ballistics seems to be the middle of the road type.  There are also a good amount of different kinds of gear and augmentations.  You do have limited space to carry all this stuff with, though, so you have to make the choice of what you value most and on who.  Does your Infiltrator get that immunity to poison or the fast recharge on their energy for more frequent use of the invisibility cloak?

You like the idea of setting up an explosive, throwing a grenade that keeps the sound from getting out, then exploding the now silent bomb on a door to get to the other side?  That's a thing you can do.

    All that has a caveat, though: The AI is rock stupid sometimes.  The pathfinding is a bit odd, occasionally sending someone at a dead-end that never was a valid path.  You also can't be sure that your characters will even be able to hit an enemy, since they don't seem to be able to tell that the pole right in front of them is in the way, and will keep them from hitting the guy 30 ft away.  I've actually had characters go down because my Soldier took their rocket launcher and launched that rocket a grand total of 5 feet ahead, where it hit the barrier a friendly was sitting behind, destroying the cover, the friendly's health, and any semblance of strategy I was using.

You sure THAT'S where you want to have an explosion, man?

    The issue I have above all others, though, is that your progression is generally limited to "You can do the same thing as you could, but better."  Your hacker can be upgraded to hack into people's minds better, which allows them to do the same thing, but to higher-tier enemies.  Your Soldier can be upgraded to rewire higher tier transformers.  Your Infiltrator can stay invisible longer or deal more damage with their katana.  Your Support can use their scan-vision thing with a larger radius or heal more at a time.  Other than giving one character the abilities of another, that tends to be it outside of equipment, which isn't class-limited.  While, yes, the game introduces things like sentries and mechs, the end result is that you end up doing largely the same things over and over again.  Most infiltrations past a certain point amounted to getting my Infiltrator in, equipped with the tool that lets them hack using the Hacker's skill level.  They go in, deal with the guards and cameras, then open the door for the friendlies to join in, rinse repeat until the job is done.  It didn't matter if I got spotted because everyone is combat-ready, so I can hunker down or escape if need be.

Performance Anxiety, eh?

    This isn't going to be long enough to warrant the heading thing, but I do consider it important enough to point out with one: The game does not run well whatsoever.  I recommended it to a friend, and they couldn't even play the game at an acceptable framerate when it was calm.  I was usually hovering between 20 and 30 FPS, with heavy action dropping the game to the teens, along with needing to keep my browser at one tab to keep the game from taking up too much RAM.

    The game is heavy, even at the lowest possible settings.  Do not expect great framerates unless you have a computer with seriously impressive specs.

It's also a bit buggy.  I've had the occasional character clip into a building, and there's a fairly annoying bug/oversight that happens if you have too many characters hacked for direct control.  The game seems to only be able to give a certain number of characters the ability to reveal the fog of war, so if you exceed a certain number of controlled characters, you may end up having to control others without being able to see enemies they may encounter.  That is fairly bad, but it didn't happen often enough to be an issue, largely because I'd keep most of my characters in groups, so I'd at least have one person with vision in each group.

You see that blue dot in the top middle?  That's one of my characters not providing vision.  They're supposed to be providing vision.

We need that number score!  What is it, man!?

    I'm not going to give this a number score.  I'd rather you read through this whole review because it took forever to write that will tell you more than a number score ever could.

    Overall, the game gets a decent recommendation from me.  It has enough unique about it that it stands out, assuming you can put up with the performance issues.  The story is basically nonexistant, but the graphics and sound are good, with the gameplay being really satisfying when you can pull off the tasks you need to.  It does get repetitive, thanks in large part to the way the game handles progression, but it does have enough unique combinations of how things are laid out that I could barely notice it.