TLDR Look at the global achievement completion. People didn't play the game. It sucked. For the record, "Downtown Pacifist" is a broken achievement that triggers if you load into the game after finishing the less than 5 minute tutorial (as in a second session playing the game). And Stealth Kills seem to count any kills.

The game is more bugs than game. I have no idea how this may have run ten years ago, but currently it's not worth it. Bugs aside, it feels like if someone wanted to make Space Marshals, but with XCOM controls. Yet on top of that, pausing takes you to a separate menu, so you have to make all of your commands in real time (which are closer to suggestions). You have no UI or information to tell you how far your weapons can shoot, so you have to attack someone and then react to whether your agents shoot them like you commanded, or bolt out of cover to get closer to their target until they are much closer than they need to be to be in range. If something fails, like throwing a grenade into an area or trying to use an ability, the game won't tell you why, and it can be unclear whether the ability worked at all. For some reason the game has a physics engine, which only causes problems. You can't see what a skill will level into past the level you are currently buying, which makes it very difficult to tactically invest in your skill tree. On top of that, there's hidden bonuses in your skill tree that cause more confusion than help, like the hacker getting a super boost to hacking duration (doors stay unlocked for longer, cams stay down for longer, etc.).

The game is also written like it has much more depth than it does. There's power plants that are "critical infrastructure" which you can sabotage and turn off, and it's said that they will very quickly be investigated and repaired. Not only are they never investigated, and randomly turn back on at arbitrary times (not due to any actual maintenance), but they stay turned off much longer than any other features/abilities you have access to in the game. Spawn mechanics in the game are based off of your camera location, not your squad, so you can pan away for a few seconds and pan back to find yourself surrounded by people. There's researching mechanics to make you choose between using the rewards you got once, or waiting 10-20 minutes (while doing whatever else you want in-game) and then getting an infinite number of them (the clearly better choice). You can build a research team, which only gives you personal researchers costing 2/3 the price of freelancer researchers. So much of the flavor text is written as if it's something to pay attention to, but has no practical effect.

Game mechanics and progress that feel important may mean nothing at all. There are checkpoints to keep you out of later game areas until you complete long quest lines to unlock them, however you can just run straight through them and skip all of it. Getting caught in most places just ends with the enemies walking you out of the area, and then kicking you (which near instantly heals, as health is a meaningless resource) and fining you for a few thousand credits (which near instantly recovers, as money is a meaningless resource). Getting caught skipping the scanners in a checkpoint leads to you getting escorted 2 feet to your left, as the path past the scanners is still a civ-legal area, and you can then continue though without any passes. You can skip any reward you would get from any of the missions by buying it on the black market instead. You can also be "stuck" unable to reasonable complete some missions, as they can select terminals anywhere for their objectives, meaning that you could have a starter mission in the first district requiring you to break into the maximum security prison in the "final" district to progress.

Simple orders like "move squad to take cover at these 4 spots the game is highlighting when I hover my mouse here" will often lead to one or more of your squad "sliding" along their expected stop location, and taking cover one or more tiles to the left or right, which often isn't cover at all. Imaging watching someone move to take cover at the corner of a wall, and after they get to the corner they take two steps out past it, and then lean their back up against nothing while they get pummeled by the enemy. 80% of the time you can fix this by reselecting the same location again once they have stopped moving the first time. Commanding your agents to fight specific enemies is hit or miss, as they may engage them, engage someone else, or sit there doing nothing at all. Asking them to engage again could cancel someone else's fighting order. Changing a weapon briefly takes an agent out of combat mode, and then puts them into combat mode. If you are in an area under security supervision, but want to prepare for an upcoming fight by having a different weapon preselected (as you can't tactically pause, so you need every bit of preparation advantage when time is of the essence), you have to hide your agent somewhere while they pull out the weapon they'll need to use, and then put it away again. If you want to change someone's weapon later in an active battle, you'll likely be using a time slow ability, which makes the few moments someone is taken out of combat mode when switching weapons last forever, and you can't tell them who you want to target with that weapon until they swap back. Special abilities like "Draw Fire" to make sure the squishy rest of your squad don't die don't seem to have any effect, and without any status effect information, it's hard to tell whether some other abilities work at all. Whether an ability needs a right or left click to select its target is arbitrary, so learning them is a pain.

This part is harder to write out, as I wasn't recording everything with plans to make a review initially, but it seems that the game was coded terribly. If I disconnect my headset, Satellite Reign will go unresponsive until it re-detects my headset. If I open the game and tab to something else while it loads, it becomes impossible to swap back to the game (can't fix it by doing fullscreen or windows+arrow key shenanigans), as the window seems to have a size of 0 and nothing loads graphically. When the game does load, I have to tab out and back into it to actually lock my mouse to it. If you have multiple objectives on the same thing, like two different missions that want you to break into the same location, tracking either of them will put a marker on that location, however if you are tracking both and then untrack one, the marker is deleted, even though you are still tracking the other. You can place custom markers on the map, but the only way to clear them is to untrack everything. It's very possible for both yourself and enemies to get stuck in geometry. There's also objectives stuck in geometry too. Some parts of the map show walkable areas that are out of bounds in the game, however they have power plants or other objects inside of them.

Systems in the game were made more advanced and dynamic than it could handle. For example, civilians found next to a dead body will be assigned a threat/suspicion level, and will start to be arrested by security. After going through the surrender animation for a few seconds, they will get up and just start walking, and then set off an alarm and be hunted down and murdered by security forces. When alarms do go off, security forces nearby will all try to rush to you (except for the ones that arbitrarily ignore you), including security forces that are part of a different faction and have no right to be in that area, which leads to different factions of security arresting and fighting each other in the middle of trying to fight you.

I completed this game because I wanted to give it a fair review, and the completionist in me wanted to since I got it in a bundle, but it was not an enjoyable experience.

It's not raining satellites, I dont know what they're talking about

ok