Satellite Reign has been fully released and below you can read our First Impressions of it, accompanied by a video with the game’s first 15 minutes. Satellite Reign is a real-time, class-based strategy game, set in an open-world cyberpunk city, and is referred to as the spiritual successor to Syndicate Wars.
In Satellite Reign, you command a group of 4 agents. Each agent has his own abilities and skills, and players are tasked with various missions/objectives to accomplish.
Satellite Reign uses a top-down camera viewpoint and while players are unable to rotate it (though they can zoom in and out), we do have to say that the automatic and dynamic position of the camera works great. Instead of making your gaming experience a nightmare – as other old-school strategy games – the camera swifts left and right whenever there are obstacles/buildings on screen. It’s a really clever feature that we’d love to see and in other strategy games.
As said, Satellite Reign is a strategy game. However, players can also level up their characters. Players gain experience points by accomplishing their missions or by using the special abilities and skills of their agents.
What’s really amazing about Satellite Reign is its “openness.” Players can accomplish their missions via different strategies. You can sneak in through ventilation shafts, hack doors, use ziplines to access specific areas, take out power generators, hijack the minds of guards, use cloak to infiltrate undetected, or just blow the front door down.
And then there is this subtle yet lovely atmosphere that the game throws at you. There is minimal music, and the game’s graphics will not blow you away. Still, Satellite Reign has something special about its whole presentation. It’s not its textures. It’s not its cleverly real-time reflections that have been implemented. And it’s not its lighting system. It’s its art style. And that’s something that most will appreciate, despite its various graphical – and technical – shortcomings.
Performance wise, Satellite Reign requires at least an NVIDIA GTX680 for a smooth experience at High settings. There isn’t any SLI profile currently, and we strongly suggest disabling the Screen-Space Reflections if you do not own a high-end GPU. With SSR disabled, our NVIDIA GTX690 (that behaved as a single GTX680 due to the lack of an SLI profile) was running the game with 60fps (though there were some minor drops here and there). With SSR enabled, our framerate dropped to 35-50fps.
All in all, Satellite Reign is a great and fun game, and we highly recommend it. Although the game lacks any co-op mode and its missions can get repetitive, it’s Satellite Reign’s free-form gameplay that will make you addicted to it. The fact that players can also upgrade their agents in order to suit their own playing style is a big plus, and this is primarily the reason why you’ll keep playing it.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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