alt Hacker News> it came out on Steam as an early release but never quite made playability IMHO
Satellite Reign has been released as a full game, playable from start to finish and it's really excellent (no idea tbh why the Steam reviews are stuck at 'Mixed', kids these days smh...). It takes a bit to get into the 'flow' and discover all the little gameplay details but once you "got it" it's a lot of fun. I usually do a playthrough at least once a year.
Also re Pirates: one of my favourite 'strategy' games on the Amiga. The 2004 remake in 3D is fun but the graphics really haven't aged well and the art style wasn't all that great to start with.
I'd really like to see a modern 2D Pirates remake with a bit more historical details and fewer gimmicks (e.g. no sword fights and QTE dancing please).
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What are the kind of details that emerge in satellite reign?
I was a kickstarter supporter, having played syndicate in childhood, but remember bouncing about 1-2hrs in, mostly because it felt bland, but would love to hear if the world and action becomes more involved :).
Satellite Reign is amazing, but it was released prematurely. The optimization is horrible such that you'll often struggle to hit 60FPS even on modern hardware, let alone what it must have run like when it was new, some achievements are broken, and there's bugs abounds - like getting stuck in geometry. There's some fan mods that tried to fix stuff but I think these sort of things really push people away. The entire concept of how the game works is also not well explained in the tutorial.
I'd still rate the game a 7/10 because it's so absurdly fun if you can get passed all of this, but it's easy to see how it probably never reached even a fraction of its potential market.