But someone writing thinks it needs to be funny. For example, a lot of weapon/item descriptions are actually pop culture references. Like the XL12 Boomstick's text is literally the Army of Darkness quote about S-Mart's shotgun. An otherwise thematically awesome game for some reason is fucking it up with humor. And not just a little humor. Quite a bit. And the friendliness of your handler continues with mission completion texts being like "Good job!" and "Great work!" and "That showed 'em!"
Again, the entire rest of the game is in lockstep with the Cyberpunk theme from top to bottom.....except whoever is doing the writing.
Hah, I had forgotten you said this, nenjin. I even saw a mission named "Papers, Please.". The humor didn't bother me a lot, because I assume Tag (the female handler) writes all of the descriptions and all that, and for some reason that character is very positive and "
funny". Probably because she's stuck in an underground bunker looking at screens and watching movies all day somewhere, so she doesn't see all these murders and crimes on the streets.
Can you continue playing after the ending?
No idea. But I'd expect that.
How openended is it? I am considering getting it, but only if its a procedurally generated enough sandbox. Xcom like at least
And the enemies and their behavior?
Nothing like XCOM (except the Research, which reminds me of XCOM: find a prototype, research it, then you're free to mass-produce it).
It's a MegaCity divided by districts (maps), and there's no loading times to move between them.
But the whole map is hand-made (unless it rebuilds the map on every save, which I doubt), and everything's static.
Some missions will give you bonuses like "Enemies take 50% longer to call reinforcements" or "Enemies from this faction will deal 10% less damage", but I still see no effect of your actions in-game. So people keep spawning and their behavior is always the same: patrol until it sees something ilegal, an alert happens or noise is heard.
So whoever's looking for a deep sandbox experience, in which you can assassinate procedurally generated high-profile targets, or fight a war against factions, or explode a base so it stops churning out drones and clones..that's not the game you're looking for.
I myself expected some sort of complexity in this regard, because when you look at a beautiful huge-ass map like this, some sort of faction system would make sense.
Unless this sort of thing happens in the end, I don't expect any of that.
It can be really fun, though. Even though enemies have the same behavior, you find ways to troll them differently every time. And as you unlock more skills and gear, you find ways to troll them further, which lets you advance even faster towards the end of the game.
The way each base has different entry and exit points, with different strategies that can be used to get in and out, is also really cool.
I'm not sure if it's worth 20USD though. Because, as I said in other threads, in my mind it doesn't make sense to have a sandbox game with static mechanics and world.
So here's when I realize this
isn't a sandbox game. It's an open-world game. You're free to pursue the objectives whenever/however you like, but saying it's sandbox or open-ended give a complete wrong impression that I had about it too.
That's sad.
So to summarize: I really love the visuals, audio, controls, interface (could be improved, but it's good enough) and the map design, but it could have been
insanely good if it was an actual open-ended, sandbox game with procedurally generated missions, bounties, stuff, and a faction system.
Is it good enough (or worth 20 USD) without all these complex and sandbox mechanics? That's hard to say, because I bet a lot of people would love it.
I saw someone say "The game's really fun, but doesn't give you too many reasons to play it" - so if Tactical Shooters and Syndicate is your thing, you'd probably like it for the fun itself.
For reference, I haven't liked/been interested in games without such sandboxy mechanics for a while now, yet I'm playing just for the fun of it. And also steamrolling and exploding unsuspecting guards.
--
Oh, the cars and traffic also look good. Stand in the middle of the road on The Grid for a traffic jam.
I wish we could drive cars. Or that cars would explode people when running over them..but they just insta-break.
You know a game could have been further developed when cars don't explode people in such a dystopian universe.
Author
Topic: Satellite Reign (Read 19041 times)