Saturday Morning Gaming: Satellite Reign is a modern Syndicate

We talked about Syndicate a couple weeks ago. A brilliant amoral video game where you use your cyber-enhanced agents to hack, kidnap, and assassinate your way to global domination.

I know that *I* have been wondering “why hasn’t someone tried to remake this?” and and, well, I have since found the game “Satellite Reign”.

This is a game that looked at Syndicate and said “We should remake that.”

It’s got a lot of similar beats. You create your own name and symbol just like in Syndicate:

And then you’re given your first agent and you have to go collect your other 3 agents and run your mission. The good news:

YOU HAVE CAMERA CONTROLS.

You quickly learn that each one of your agents has different skills and abilities. This one is good at combat (and has potential to become great at it), that one is good at hacking (less combat potential though), and so on.

Now here’s the bad news, I guess:

They’ve changed the theme of the game. You are no longer an amoral corporate controller hoping to take over the world, you are now the handler of a handful of ragtag cyberpunk protagonists who are taking on the corporations.

Whether or not this is an improvement is, of course, up to the player but I find myself thinking “oh” when I get a new mission and the preamble is about how we need to fight back.

I suppose that that is more in line with modern interpretations of cyberpunk, of course… but there’s a little piece of me that thinks that part of what made Syndicate so interesting was that you were playing a cold and ruthless protagonist rather than yet another plucky underdog.

Ah, well.

If you want to play the bad guy, you can still get the original. If the gameplay was what had you hooked, well, Satellite Reign gives you a lovely little squad-based RPG that has multiple ways to achieve any given objective.

So… what are you playing?