Syndicate Remake Satellite Reign GIFs Us An Update

"I wonder what's going on with Syndicate remake/spiritual sequel Satellite Reign?" I asked myself yesterday. "It's been a while since we heard anything about it. Oh God, maybe it's dead, oh no, please", I panicked, before realising that "heard" would involve "games sites covering it", which meant that I simply hadn't checked in on it for a few months, which meant that I should go and do that right now. So I did. And I'm glad I did.

It seems they've been putting out progress updates several weeks or sometimes months apart, mustering only nine in the year since their Kickstarter completed, which unsurprisingly caused some community alarm, but it's been defended as a consequence of the team being too buried in the game's development. The July and August updates showed off a fair amount of stuff though, and they claim to be on track for an Early Access release before the year's out, with backer alphas ahead of that.

The updates do concentrate heavily on the visual side of the game, including environmental design, which I guess is important for getting people excited, but I'm keen to see more about how the thing works - particularly in terms of the contentious move to an XCOM class system.

This is a good-lookin' futurescape, though:

The meaty stuff should hit in October, when devs 5 Lives are taking the game to PAX Australia on the 31st and letting the public get hands-on with it for the first time. It's possible backers will have alpha access before then, but we shall see.

In the meantime, a set of GIFs show off the crowd tech, NPC animations, sci-fi gizmos and some laser-death:

Do click through to big-size versions with more detail.

I guess it screams Bladerunner more than it does Syndicate right now, but my eyes are pleased by it nevertheless.

The post-Kickstarter pledging system has now closed too, but pre-orders are promised soon, if speculative purchasing is your bag, baby.

I'm excited, but I'm excited more because Syndicate has been either ignored or mistreated for the last couple of decades than I am about anything Satellite Reign has shown so far. I hope that'll flip around in a few weeks' time.