This is a really interesting take on the tower defense genre, and it certainly fits well on the playdate making a good use of the crank.  There's 25 different missions to play, which each bring something new to the table.  Missions have some fun dialogue between a few different characters and some interesting scenarios that shake up gameplay, each lasting for only a couple of minutes at most.

While I think this short mission time could be a good thing for some people and certainly makes sense on a portable device like the playdate, it's something I ended up not being a huge fan of.  I enjoy the longer play sessions of many other tower defense games since it gives you a feeling of progress and incrementally gaining power as you race against your opponents.  This game has that in some ways, but because it's structured into missions it feels like you're being torn down just as much as you're building up a strong defense.  I realize this is likely a limitation of a game like this on the playdate, as the lower processing power means a giant horde of enemies and towers isn't really possible, but it's still disappointing to not have any kind of endless mode or longer gamemode.

There were also certain missions I didn't really enjoy due to their mechanics and those missions really soured the experience for me, especially as they occurred near the end of the game.  Mission 22 is one of the most frustrating experiences I've had on a playdate game thus far, and is honestly the main thing bringing this review down to 3 stars (yes, I thought it was that bad).  It tasks you with placing three towers in the perfect positions to attack waves of enemies, and requires a tedious amount of trial and error to line up these waves with the rotating planets.  I switched the game to easy mode in order to beat it and even still it took many attempts as easy mode only increases the number of ships you can let through.  If I could have skipped this level, I would have in a heartbeat, but there's no way to skip missions.

Overall, I think satOlite was a decent experience for what it was trying to do, let down by a couple of frustrating and unfun missions.  While that might not bring the experience down too much, it's also rather short which makes the bad parts feel worse.  If you're looking for Bloons on the playdate this isn't it, but it can still be a mostly enjoyable experience if you play it for what it is, rather than for what it isn't.