Jumped back into this after a big update came through.
The game has tightened up immensely since couple months in of EA. Performance is much better (although I'm on a much better machine now.) The UI is cleaner, to a degree. The menu system and all its options are filling out with stuff instead of just being blank, the mission tree is now sensibly laid out instead of being a clusterfuck of bullet points.
Gameplay likewise is starting to stretch its legs. Quests are starting to get filled out as well so there's something like 8 missions, some with several smaller optional missions, for a total of like 20 things to do in the first area. A pretty big step forward from what was there back in January-ish.
Clones have most if not all their skills now, there's augmentations (both for clones and their weapons) now, there's secondary gear to equip and better visual customization options. (I particularly like that your coats glow the color of your corporation you chose at the start of the game.) There's obviously still more coming here, like different kinds of headware like Goggles and what not to pick from. You get 4 characters each with a distinct look, but you can swap who is playing what role visually. So maybe you want the chick with the Mohawk to be your Soldier instead of your Hacker. Their character portraits also reflect the role they're playing, which is a nice touch. Switching people around like this would make zero sense if this were say, your standard RPG. But the cloneness and the fact your characters never speak means you're not attaching a lot of identity to them.
The game feels pretty playable at this point. In the 10 or so hours I've put in across several EA restarts, I've never left the starting zone, and there are now three to play in. When I first tried the game there was little to spend money on, installing Siphon hacks on ATMs left me with tons of cash and the smattering of abilities didn't make grinding XP to earn them seem all that exciting. Things seem a little better balanced now. Money isn't flowing in non-stop, things you research then purchase to equip to your guys are not inexpensive, XP from completing missions seems better balanced against just farming respawning enemies in compounds, and it all feels like it's paced a bit better for a long haul, sandbox style game.
The filled out missions now also provide some much needed "give a fuck" about what you're doing. Before the standard mission was to "walk into this doorway in a restricted area to complete the mission." Getting to the objective is what this game is about, it mostly abstracts away the actual doing of things.
That's still the case, but getting there is plenty involved. There's a lot security to deal with, from disabling cameras to unlocking doors to many foot soldiers walking around. Many of the optional sub objectives (which are usually small parts of the map attached to larger compounds, complete with their own "walk into this to make stuff happen" buildings) of to the larger missions tweak these parameters, like making cameras slower, guys weaker and doors unlocked by inside or bribed agents. All in all missions were simple to start with and they still are, but there's enough surrounding detail and moving parts they're more compelling now. Last night I broke some black market med-tech researchers out of a compound and ended up running them and my team out of the compound while being chased by security guards unloading on us. One of the researchers died in the escape attempt. It was all to make the guards in ANOTHER compound have less HP (the reasoning behind why you're doing the mission is actually fairly convoluted.) While the missions aren't stellar, they're several levels above where they were the last time I played. None of it is particularly difficult but it requires you to use your brain, have a plan and be paying attention to a lot of moving bits. More on that below.
So there seems? to be a lot of content now per district. I feel like I could put in 10 hours or more just in the starting district, completing all the non-essential objectives like robbing banks or hacking the City Surveillance Authority.
I should probably mention stealth at this point. It seems to play a pretty big role in the game. Walking into a restricted corporate compound and lighting people up is a good way to get dead, fast. At the start of the game enemies are not much weaker than you. Fighting three or four guys at once can easily drop a clone in your party. Standing there trading shots with them in cover works until you get naded and everyone loses 80% life. There's also some fiddly line of sight issues with elevated positions, where a guy with a shotgun might be drilling you, but the guy he's shooting (who is holding a sniper rifle) can't manage to shoot back because his round goes right into the level terrain. So you end up having to reposition so you have a clear line of fire, usually while taking fire yourself. The game wants you tactically spreading your team out and using cover, but the lack of a pause button means it's all real time, and right now you don't have time to leisurely set positions or swap weapons or activate abilities, when your guys are getting wasted where they're currently standing. So combat right now is controlling all your guys as a group, using what cover all 4 of them can fit into and focus firing everything. If this game had a pause button I think it might make for a great tactical experience, halfway between X-COM and an RTS. Right now it just feels like an RTS where you don't have the time to do what you need to do.
I say all that to emphasize why stealth is usually the better option. Compounds I've been in so far are not crawling with guys, there's plenty of cover and optional routes, and so it's possible while not necessarily being easy to complete objectives unseen. It takes patience, favorable pathing on patrols, and usually your hacker needs to be there to disable security cameras (which ARE liberally placed) and open doors. I had one mission objective to activate a transponder in a corporate compound somewhere. Walking in the front door was out of the question. But there was a zipline on a adjacent building that would take you right into the compound next to the transponder. All you had to do then was escape (through the locked doors that were the only way out of the compound, which were also guarded by dudes.) So instead of sending my whole team, I sent one guy, stealthed him through the compound back to the main gates, and hid him in a lightly patrolled garage until my hacker came around the front side of the compound to hack the door and let him out. That felt pretty satisfying, especially because the route seemed damn near impossible to stealth without being caught, but my timing was good and I pulled it off without anyone being the wiser. Stealth feels pretty slick....when you don't fuck up. You can preform stealth kills if you can move a clone behind a guy undetected. Which is easier said than done sometimes.
Enemy alerts are kind of tricky. There's sight, and sound, so the longer it takes to kill some guys, the better chance other units in the area will hear and investigate. Under certain conditions (like shooting out a camera or getting seen by one, or letting an enemy that's seen you radio in) new enemies will be spawned inside a compound. If you avoid all those things though, you seem to be able to clear an area of enemies. It's a nice balance of tactically cleaning a place out while not totally giving you the run of it. Sometimes patrollers spot you and you can kill them before things escalate too quickly. Sometimes you start a fight and too many baddies get involved, a guy runs off and radios in, your "wanted level" increases, new enemies spawn and there's basically no chance to get the mission back on a stealth footing. Your best bet is to run and re-enter the compound after things have cooled off. Again, it's the kind of thing that if you have patience, you can do it a bit at a time in relative safety. But if you're not paying attention (and there is a lot of a screen to pay attention to especially when the mission requires you to spread your team out), or you get greedy, things can become untenable quick.
Dying is trivial and yet not trivial. When a clone runs out of HP they go down, at which point other clones can interact with them to get them back on their feet. If their bleed out timer runs down, the clone dies. At this point, you can immediately rez them at the nearest relay beacon, at a pretty sizable credit cost and no XP penalty. Or, you can wait. The credit cost goes down and the XP penalty goes up. Losing a key team member inside a compound can make it hard to impossible to finish, because they spawn outside the compound. But there's gear that lets you respawn them next to the team, if you have it. I haven't got a good sense of that stuff because combat is so hard to get a handle on. Fighting one guy? He'll die in seconds. Fighting 3 plus guys? Bedlam.
Re: The story. I'm still not really pleased with the tone of it. Sure, it's got all the fixin's. Big Cyberpunk, corporate-owned, Blade Runner-inspired, neon crap-sack future city. The visuals support all this to a T. But the dialog your "handler" has with you....is still completely out of place. I half expect most mission intros to begin with "Heya pal!" The tone all the mission information is given with still reads very informal, friendly, casual, almost upbeat. I don't feel like I'm working for a soulless future corp hell bent on world domination no matter the cost. I feel like I'm in a self-run start up business with my chums, the way they talk to me.
The plot of the story seems to be there to facilitate its sandbox nature. It goes like this: Crapsack City is run by a group called the Eternals. Dracogenics Corp. has invented some sort of Resurrection Technology that is inexplicably better than cloning a body and downloading your consciousness into it. World domination imminent. And so your corp wants to steal it. To get it, you're going to have to get to their corporate headquarters. And to do that, you're going to have to subvert every single district in the city, neutralize the security apparatus of each group controlling their district, steal money from banks, undercut city security systems run by the Eternals, hack computers to get an edge in your missions and generally crawl over the whole game. Even going between districts requires quests to get fake credentials or bribe the people controlling access.
So if you're looking for something specific out of the story (I don't remember squat of Sydicate's story other than I did feel like I was working for an evil future corp instead of "Three Guys' Corp for World Domination"), you may not get it here. The world is big on scope but the story is short on flavor, and the writer is doing it no favors. It just utterly fails to get me invested a lot of the time, which is a real disappointment because almost everything else in the game delivers on flavor and theme. Why they have such a well-executed theme, backed up such banal writing is beyond me. And it JUST seems restricted to the mission briefs, the only part of the game where anyone tries to speak to you. The Weapon, Gear and Augment descriptions? Wonderfully detailed and cyberpunk-y, filled with all the techno babble you could ask for.
I feel like I know what the problem is, partly. Whoever is writing dialog seems to think they need to take an almost Shadowrun tone. They aren't dropping "Chummer" or anything, but I feel like the handler gives off a street vibe, like we're just a really sophisticated gang....and not a ruthless corporation. Syndicate to me was like playing Shadowrun from the corp perspective, all mirror shades and terse directives. The game isn't really delivering that.
If I seem like I'm harping on this a lot, I want to reiterate: this is the only "human" contact you have in game. This is the only person talking to you. Aside from reading what your gear and guns and shit do, the mission briefs and debriefs are the only interaction with the written word you have in this game. All your contacts, bribed scientists, bribed guards and workers, freed or kidnapped citizens...no one talks. So there is only one voice in the game right now, and it's your good buddy, your pal, Anonymous Corporate Handler.
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All in all though? I'm pleased with how it's coming. I've played maybe 3 to 4 games of it so far, and after and hour or two I'd be like "Eh, s'ok but it's time to play something else." This time, I'm feeling compelled to keep playing because the balance of activities and progression is there. The game isn't too terribly far from full release and they say most of the content is in. Which, if they stopped right now pretty much I'd be left saying it's a very pretty cyberpunk sandbox game with plenty of playable hours in it, but it's a bit on the shallow side at times. Which would describe Syndicate pretty well (other than the pretty part....)
But if they've got a respectable chunk of stuff left to add before release it could still elevate this to something pretty special. I'm off to see if I can discover what the rest of the game is like instead of grinding away eternally in the starting district.
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Topic: Satellite Reign (Read 18998 times)