Games

The unannounced Kickstarter sequels we want now

Santa might leave you AAA games under the tree, but all we want are these seven Kickstarter sequels.
Written by Rich Wordsworth
7 min readPublished on
Satellite Reign

Satellite Reign

© 5 Lives Studios

Oh, how the naysayers did say 'nay' at the prospect of crowdfunded gaming. 'What? Games paid for by fans and not fat cats? With community feedback and developer updates and transparency AND oodles of cool, free stuff as thanks for my support? Pfft. OK. I’ll back your game. You can drop it off in your chocolate helicopter on the helipad of my floating castle made of DREAMS.' Literally what those naysayers said.
Well, more fool them. Crowdfunded games have been so successful that, like greedy sugar-flecked children tearing into a second pack of cronuts, we’re no longer content with the existing platter of sterling Kickstarter games – we want more. So, tear yourself off a caramel-fudge rotor blade and gorge yourself on our list of already-brilliant Kickstarter games for which we petulantly demand sequels.
Wasteland 3
Wasteland 2

Wasteland 2

© inXile

One of the original standard bearers for the Kickstarter revolution, Wasteland 2 was a bit like what Fallout 3 might have been if Bethesda hadn’t forced us to peer out at its grey-green, low-res apocalypse in first-person (but with squad members and more killer mutant bunny rabbits). A loving, nostalgic throwback to the days when the old-school CRPG [Computer Role-Playing Game] was king, inXile’s to 1988’s original Wasteland saw your squad of grizzled Desert Rangers battling evil robots, rescuing feckless botanists from mutated plant life and generally enjoying the silver lining on the mushroom cloud – a delightful opening salvo for crowdfunded gaming.
There are a few things we’d tweak in a sequel, mind. Combat in the game’s turn-based system sometimes got a bit in-your-face, with melee-focused baddies often charging into kissing distance of our snipers in a single turn, messing up our aim. We’d also like some more incidental areas to explore on the world map, a la the Fallouts of yore. Oh, and more options to be evil, please – some of us are actually quite taken with the idea of robot-ifying the human race.
Satellite Reign 2
Satellite Reign

Satellite Reign

© 5 Lives Studios

If there’s an irony in a multimillion dollar publisher rolling out a game about evil corporations, it seems to have been lost on today’s mainstream games industry. “Fear the conglomerates! Rage against the pitiless engines of capitalistic control! Also: please buy the season pass.”
Thrust your fist defiantly in the air, then, for the plucky resistance of 5 Lives Studios – an underdog developer of the people headed by Mike Diskett, the man behind early-'90s tactical squad shooter, Syndicate. Like a cyberpunk Wasteland 2, Satellite Reign puts you in charge of a four-man neon-goth resistance unit, with which you battle the corporatocracy through smarts, hacking, subterfuge and an arsenal of near-future boomsticks.
The only problem? The Gibson-esque neon future city only looks deep. As you skulk about this massive, open metropolis, your squad of techno-guerillas is illuminated by signs for all sorts of markets, stores, bars and nightclubs – but their doors are mostly just painted-on bits of scenery. Surely there’s more to our future cyber-Dystopia than gun battles and corporate espionage? How about popping into one of those bars for a quick pitstop? We’ll have to wait for a sequel to find out.
Stasis 2
Stasis

Stasis

© The Brotherhood

Still a game we’re baffled exists: Stasis is most easily described as Dead Space meets the original, top-down Fallout games. Your lone survivor of some mysterious space abuse wakes up on a derelict ship called the Groomlake, and after poking around comes to realise that its crew of corporate scientists were indulging in the sorts of experiments that would, to put it mildly, struggle in front of an ethics committee. That something this good was basically made by just two people – sibling developers Nic and Chris Bischoff – is a level of achievement that makes the pyramids look half-baked.
Hopefully, the rave reviews will give a boost to whatever twisted imaginings the Bischoffs cook up next – our hope is that with more cash, the next game could offer multiple solutions and paths of progression, rather than the largely linear creep-a-thon to be found in Stasis.
Shadowrun 3
Shadowrun Hong Kong

Shadowrun Hong Kong

© Harebrained Schemes

Beating this list to the punch by the best part of half a year, developer Harebrained Schemes not only put out the first big-name-franchise Kickstarter game, Shadowrun, but followed up with more of its neo-Tolkein, cyberpunk-and-wizards future with Shadowrun: Hong Kong mere months later. This is not a studio that knocks off early.
Like the other games on this list, there’s nothing concrete about plans for a third instalment for the Shadowrun series, and the studio is currently in the pre-alpha stage of development on its other beloved franchise, BattleTech. But we’re hoping the globe-hopping trend continues – there are plenty of other world cities just begging to have their corporate overlords laid low by our crew of cybernetic fairytale monsters.
Sunless Sea 2
Sunless Sea

Sunless Sea

© Failbetter Games

Like falling face first into a tub of raspberry sorbet, quasi-text-adventure-boat-’em-up Sunless Sea feels surprising, refreshing, and damp. The London of old has collapsed into the ground and come to rest in a pitch black underworld called the Neath, and as the captain of a rickety steam boat, your job is to capitalize on the situation by pootling about the surviving islands of the former capital on the Unterzee (a Germanification of ‘under sea’), discovering new lands, trading for supplies and getting killed by giant crab monsters – all a bit like a steampunk Jack Sparrow.
There’s so much to love in Sunless Sea: the dark, moody ambience; the tense thrill of launching off for points unknown; worrying about your food stores; watching as those food stores run out and your crew go mad and eat each other. But in a time when triple-A studios still seem to do most of their writing on the backs of discarded napkins, it’s Sunless Sea’s incredible humour and writing we want more of. No other changes, please – just more of this pseudo-Victorian Gothic wonderfulness.
Dex 2
Dex 2

Dex 2

© Dreadlocks Ltd

Remember what we said about Satellite Reign’s world feeling a bit shallow? Well, Dex makes a solid effort to address that problem. Playing like a grimy, sprite-based, side-scrolling Deus Ex, not only are you encouraged to fraternise with the locals of the cyberpunk Dystopia, it’s how you receive most of your tasks. Not that the denizens of the game’s Blade Runner future are particularly nice to interact with, mind – most of them have fingers in more criminal pies than Sweeney Todd, and are so blasé about taking each other out, they’ll happily hand out assassination contracts to anyone who wanders in off the street (lucky for you).
The main gripe we’ve got is with the blend of stealth and combat – screw up the first and it’s the old problem of having to fight your way through every single enemy for a half mile, with combat that can feel unfairly stacked. If developer Dreadlocks and Satellite Reign’s 5 Live Studios could somehow be downloaded into the same developer consciousness, you’d have a game that’d make Adam Jensen shake until his screws fell out.
Pillars of Eternity 2
Pillars of Eternity

Pillars of Eternity

© Obsidian Entertainment

What inXile’s Wasteland 2 did for the post-apocalypse, Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity did for dwarves, tavern brawls and breaking into people’s tombs to steal their magic bits and bobs. If Wasteland 2 was the Fallout sequel that never was, then Pillars was 2014’s Baldur’s Gate.
It’s hard to think of anything we’d like changed for a sequel without sounding churlish. Sure, Pillars has its fair share of familiar high fantasy trope races – snooty elves, chunky dwarves, boring humans – but it also introduced Aumaua (giant fish-people), Orlans (murderous Furbies) and Godlikes (magical Marilyn Manson cosplayers). And yes, you could play as a Barbarian, a Ranger or a Paladin, but you could also roll the dice on whole new classes like the Chanter or the Cipher. As a result, Pillars feels like a fantasy game that’s come out with several years’ worth of expansion packs already installed – asking for more just feels piggy.
Fortunately, Obsidian has spared us that indignity by hinting that a sequel is coming, and has lightly sketched out where that sequel might take us, with the studio’s Josh Sawyer saying the plan was to move players from the first game’s verdant setting of Dyrwood to somewhere totally different (but equally fantastical). Sounds good to us.
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