Satellite Reign Review (TH3G4M3GRL)
All I can say about Satellite Reign is that everything about the game felt underbaked. The story certainly existed into a climax that came basically out of nowhere. The gameplay started to get formulaic by the second district. Every district will have you unlock your respawn/fast travel points, hack every ATM to get passive income, break into the bank for increased passive income and one time cash injection. Break into military compounds, steal loot, escape. There are three factions. None of them feel different. They'll all use armour, they'll all use shields, they'll all use robots. I think some of them favor certain weapon types? It never felt like any of them actually had any difference.
The actual gameplay itself offers several approaches, but the stealth is inconsistent. I have inputted movement commands to watch the pathfinding send my squad in the most batshit directions. I have inputted them to hide behind cover and they'll decide to just... not? Moving somewhere else nearby where I selected instead. Similarly, combat is more micromanagement than any RTS I've played. There is no automatic targeting for your squad, you must manually target each enemy for each member. Once that one is dead, you need to target another one or they'll just stand there doing nothing. So as soon as I managed to unlock strong enough weaponry, I immediately moved to the death ball approach of slaughtering my way through enemy bases. The brute force method worked wonderfully and only got stopped two or three times by the end of the game.
There's an entire mechanic where you need to spend around 20-ish minutes per item you loot to research it to be mass produced along with money. So if you really want to use that item, you'll be AFKing. Except it will auto pause the game if you're AFK, so you need to toss on an auto clicker as well if you want to just wait out some research to install a new augment or use a new weapon. Alternatively, you can use the prototypes on their own but risk losing them if your agent dies. Which also means you can't use multiple. This mechanic is just kind of annoying padding and you still need to pay money to equip the gear, so they could have just made money a bit tighter in exchange.
The gameplay loop overstays its welcome by about ten hours and by the time I reached end game, I was absolutely burnt out.