Satellite Reign - and why it's so great

tl;dr: go buy Satellite Reign!

It's pretty rare that I'm really positively surprised but Satellite Reign tickled my brain in a good way that I usually only get from games that did something groundbreaking, like Portal. The gameplay feels really fresh to me and at the moment I can't think of a similar game that has better stealth mechanics. Everything is so well integrated and intertwined with other mechanics, all solidly embedded into the lore of the game. The 4 character classes compliment each other really well and you can't just go through 90% of the game with the same strategy. The review excerpts on the steam page put it really well:

Most stealth games are set up in a way, where a screwup on your part means you will die very soon and have to try again. But Satellite Reign allows for a wonderful dynamic of making mistakes and recovering from them again. I'm only a few hours into the game but I had many great moments already, where I've barely reached my objective and made it out alive (or at least with the one guy alive that had to retrieve the prototype that I dropped on my previous attempt ^^).
It feels tense and "high-stakes", but when you really fail and all your agents die it's not so punishing that it would become frustrating. The gameplay feels rich and complex, super challenging and very satisfying when you succeed. I highly recommend it to everyone, who liked one of the old Syndicate games or is interested in complex, tactical and stealth-heavy squad gameplay. Graphics, Music and Sounddesign are amazing as well!

I've primarily made this thread because I'm so happy with the game and wanted to share my joy with you guys. But if we can get an interesting discussion going on... even better. I wonder why this game registers so clearly as "new" for my brain, since that doesn't happen very often and I didn't expect it.



I've seen one of the devs around here, so thanks a lot to @5LS-Brent and the rest of the team for making such a wonderful game! Keep up the great work!

 

Yeah I might pick it up today since its 66% off.

 

Thanks for notifying about this! Bought it and so far I like it!

 

Glad you enjoyed it, thanks for your comments

 

I had seen this. You encouraged me to give it a closer look.
Gigi

 

I got this when it was on steam sale. Really fun, especially early on (5-10hrs in). I found that the stealth approach was much more thrilling but ultimately after leveling a lot, a hijack brute force method became the my go-to strategy.

 

I have put so many hours into this game. Its really good. I have been waiting for a game to finally follow in the footsteps of the Syndicate games. They also added modding support and I have been trying to get that going in the community. I seem to be the one making and sharing mods for SR mainly though.

I have been hoping to find ways to change the way the lighting is done in the game. Since its not possible to change lighting settings during runtime I am trying to see if I might be able to do it by loading a new scene additive, with a new lighting setup... but I doubt the mod system allows for more than code to be added.

Sounds and seems like @5LS-Brent and the 5Lives team has moved on to their next project. I am working on a game of my own, but figured out how they must have used Precomputed Realtime GI for many of the lighting effects, and I would like to see if I could somehow turn those off and see how that might affect performance and although its... troublesome... to do so with a released build of a Unity project its something I would like to try see if I might be able to do.

One problem though is I am not completely sure that SR with its last update is using Unity 5.2 or 5.3 and loading scenes additive seems to be a 5.3 feature. On the other hand I can use SceneManager it seems, and the commands to load scenes additive according to the mods code dlls. So I will play around with this a bit.

It might also help me figure out how to optimize my own project, because making textures glow with Precomputed Realtime GI seems very useful to make the setting realistic and good looking. Easier to set moods and such.

 

Have you seen this one yet?

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/01/27/how-did-they-do-satellite-reigns-rain/

I just stumbled over it while searching for something else.

 

Haven't played it, but looked over some screenshots and reviews. I especially like the Reign/rain pun right in the title. Betrays a certain mindset that probably extends throughout the game.

 

I thought I had, but I do not think so. Looks interesting. Also makes me consider trying to remove both all lights and all particle systems. But its likely that some scripts rely on particle systems being in certain places.

Another thing I have begun to consider is it might be multi-threading that that is causing some of these problems, and I can most likely not really do much about that. I have tried asking them on the Steam forums if they have used coroutines or threads.

I got a project I made myself with a small town, streets, sidewalks, people walking around, cars driving on the streets, zombies eating people... that kind of stuff. I think I will try to first see how much I can optimize that before I try to find the errors in something I hardly have access to. I just found a great YouTube video about multi-threading that explains how to use threads in Unity, the benefits and the limitations. My path-finding system that I put on top of Unity's path-finding system in that project could probably really benefit from that. Or maybe if I just optimize how much it updates per frame, as it should probably update more than once per frame.

http://dionysus.dk/devstuff/unity3d/CityAI_MemFix/

Its not playable, you can just switch cameras between everyone. Its pretty basic. Nothing gets spawn after the simulation has started except humans gets spawned as zombies when they die after being attacked by zombies.

 

@Martin_H is this any way similar to XCom? I can't find any mention SR is comparable to XCom, everyone only talks about Syndicate, which I never played.
SR has been on my radar/wishlist for a while. Once I have time to clear out my current batch I'll give it a shot. The gameplay looks very interesting, and I really like the visual and audio treatments they created.

 

It's rather different from xcom since it is realtime instead of turn based. Syndicate really is the most appropriate comparison, but if you don't know that one, then I'd say it kind of feels a bit like a sci-fi version of Commandos, that old stealth strategy game series, but with less brutal difficulty and non-stealth approaches being more viable. It can get quite hectic, and you will need to use more than 1 guy for most missions because their different abilities supplement each other to overcome different obstacles. I'd say put it on your wishlist and buy it in the next sale if you have doubts. You can still return it if it isn't your cup of tea. I've finished the campaign (in ~30 hours according to steam) and really liked it.