Clearly heavily influenced by the original Syndicate (we do not talk about the reboot), Satellite Reign is a game about immoral corporate espionage set in a bleak world of skyscrapers and dismal city streets with a severe lack of natural light.

Depending on your levels of patience, Satellite Reign is either refreshingly challenging or ridiculously complicated. Honestly, I fell more on the latter side. The tutorial felt like being repeatedly smashed in the face with a technology book.

The amount of features the player is expected to remember is frankly unreasonable. Every interaction of any kind requires vital procedures. It may be more convenient to control every member of your team at once, but if you get the wrong kind of character to hack the wrong kind of terminal, you’re gonna have a bad time.

One aspect I did enjoy about Satellite Reign is its focus on stealth. It’s difficult to use brute force to succeed, as the enemies are formidable and very willing to call for reinforcements. It means that to make any progress, the player must utilise his agents’ abilities to sneak their way across the map, dipping and diving between cover and only resorting to assassination (stealth kills) when violence is unavoidable.

However, Satellite Reign does give the player the option to complete each mission in a variety of ways. There’s normally an obvious path, strewn with guards that can be sneaked past or cautiously eliminated, but if you’re a hack-happy kind of person, there’s always a way you can use your skills to make the level simpler.

You can also bribe guards and/or civilians to give you hints on short-cuts, potentially making a difficult mission much more manageable.

Unfortunately, the combat is awkward and lengthy. Relying heavily on cover-based shooting, when the stealth breaks down it can result in the player having to simply sit and watch as the characters fire back and forth whilst ever so slightly reducing the enemies’ health. As the game progresses, the combat becomes a real issue, and it got to the point where I simply reset to my last checkpoint whenever I stumbled into a battle that was avoidable.

For a game that was still in early access for the majority of the time I spent playing it, it seems excellently put together. The blue sheen on the gloomy city depicted is very easy on the eye, and I never encountered a single bug during my playthrough.

As a depicted sci-fi dystopia, Satellite Reign is pretty standard. For some reason there’s very little sunlight in the dim and distant future, and everybody clothes themselves in odd garments that are yet to be in fashion. The miserable people shuffle back and forward under the constant gaze of drones and cameras. It’s just like living in the UK.

Whilst it’s obviously influenced by Syndicate, it goes above and beyond to offer an experience which feels original. For one, the city feels alive and gives the player the impression that people are actually living there.

The impact this has on gameplay is that rather than being a linear map on which the player has to move from point A to point B as efficiently as possible, there are countless alleyways and dusky streets to explore whilst you’re on your travels.

The problem is that as far as I could see, the exploration wasn’t worth my time. As pretty as it looks, you’ll get used to the city and its inhabitants quickly.

You can undertake all kinds of shady endeavours to earn extra credits or unlock new prototype weapons, and undertaking a daring robbery on a bank is fun and all, but Satellite Reign is a stealth game, and every encounter comes with the risk of triggering a brutal gun battle. Honestly, I tried to avoid conflict as much as I could. Call me a coward.

I’m reluctant to say that this genre of game just doesn’t suit open-world style missions. The variability offers great replay value, and it does give the player the sense that they have the freedom to forge their own path, but it comes with limitations. I’m not overly fond of open-world games anyway, and at times I found myself wandering through the city in search of my next objective when I would have preferred a more typical mission-based structure.

Maybe with a little more polish and time spent adding points of interests into all the nooks and crannies, á la Grand Theft Auto, an open-world style squad-based tactical stealth game might work. Personally, I think it added an extra layer of unnecessary faff to a game that was already impenetrably complex and over-stuffed with mechanics.

It’s especially frustrating attempting to navigate your squad around a bustling city when the path-finding is questionable at best. Getting through timed security doors is a constant menace when your agents would rather run head-first into a wall until you tell them otherwise.

It may have its niggles, but with a game clearly fuelled by ambition, it’s to be expected. ‘5 Lives Studios’ took what was so ground-breaking about games like Syndicate and attempted to give them a modern twist, and it provides an experience that feels fresh and new. It’s without a doubt an extremely promising start for the budding studio.

With the amount of time and concentration it demands, whether or not its pitfalls will ruin the game for you depends on your levels of patience, and patience isn’t my strong point.

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