> it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO
Satellite Reign has been released as a full game, playable from start to finish and it's really excellent (no idea tbh why the Steam reviews are stuck at 'Mixed', kids these days smh...). It takes a bit to get into the 'flow' and discover all the little gameplay details but once you "got it" it's a lot of fun. I usually do a playthrough at least once a year.
Also re Pirates: one of my favourite 'strategy' games on the Amiga. The 2004 remake in 3D is fun but the graphics really haven't aged well and the art style wasn't all that great to start with.
I'd really like to see a modern 2D Pirates remake with a bit more historical details and fewer gimmicks (e.g. no sword fights and QTE dancing please).
Satellite Reign is amazing, but it was released prematurely. The optimization is horrible such that you'll often struggle to hit 60FPS even on modern hardware, let alone what it must have run like when it was new, some achievements are broken, and there's bugs abounds - like getting stuck in geometry. There's some fan mods that tried to fix stuff but I think these sort of things really push people away. The entire concept of how the game works is also not well explained in the tutorial.
I'd still rate the game a 7/10 because it's so absurdly fun if you can get passed all of this, but it's easy to see how it probably never reached even a fraction of its potential market.
What are the kind of details that emerge in satellite reign?
I was a kickstarter supporter, having played syndicate in childhood, but remember bouncing about 1-2hrs in, mostly because it felt bland, but would love to hear if the world and action becomes more involved :).
I like how each city district can be systematically dismantled, you usually start 'raiding' the police- and drone-stations, which decreases surveillance and increases reaction time for reinforcements in later mission in the same district. For the bigger missions you'll first scout the area for alternative entry points which best match your team's abilities. Is a stealthy approach better or do you go in guns blazing, where will you position your sniper for the best effect? Sometimes you need to escort a civilian in or out, which completely changes the typical approach.
And within a mission you always need to maintain 'tactical awareness', always have an escape route in mind, scout ahead for guard routes and schedules, hack doors and cameras, select the best approach to tackle a specific type of guard or robot. And then of course no mission goes as planned, your team gets pinned down and you need to fight your way out or find a place to hide until the alarm level cools down.
Also depending on the approach you choose for a specific mission you may need to change your team's equipment and cyberware before entering the mission area, or maybe you decide that it's better to first raid the military barracks of the district, hoping to get some new weapon and cyberware blueprints. Or you spend some downtime looking for scientists to hijack (which increase research rate for blueprints), or look for new random people in the streets with better attributes for cloning. Or running low on money maybe it's better to first rob the district bank. Each new district is harder than the last, and during the entire game you're essentially preparing for the final confrontation with the main baddy.
For a relatively small indie game there's a lot of 'gameplay density', I can understand though that the game may feel repetivite, but especially starting to tackle a new district may quickly feel like routine, but that initial routine only exists as preparation for the two or three main mission areas in the district, and those are the 'meat' of the game.