Rebel Galaxy

I am not sure why someone won't make a proper Freelancer sequel, but here's is another bland wannabe. Rebel Galaxy is fun for about 2 hours until you realize that you are doing the same kill, rescue, and delivery missions in the same empty space while listening to the same grating country-rock music tracks. I was not especially bothered by the 2D ship combat, and the fighting could actually be fun. But the game is not well paced, so you could finish one fight pretty easily and then stumble upon a gang of enemy ships that destroy you in seconds just as you were getting ready to dock at a space station, the only place where the game saves. I lost hours of progress this way. The game is only worth playing if you like the grinding of missions to upgrade your ship so that you can grind more missions to upgrade your ship further, etc. Even what passes for the campaign is part of the grind, and the side activities like trading simply help finance, yes, more mission grinding. On a positive note, the game plays well with a controller, and the graphics are pretty decent. Voice acting is okay, but there is not enough of it to offset the feeling that you are all alone most of time. If you must play this game, do wait for a sale. Otherwise, go back and play Freelancer or some other game with more character and better gameplay design. +Good graphics +Solid fighting mechanics +Upgrading and buying ships can be fun +Some people will like the music, others not so much -The game is one big mission grind with a lot of side grinds sprinkled in -Some funky camera angles in combat -Uneven difficulty, many random encounters and deaths -Game only auto-saves after leaving a space station

This game is extremely fun, at the same time a new fun idea with the feeling of an old classic. I've stopped playing all of my moba's and online games to throw myself into this ridiculously fun experience. This game is on the verge of being one I go back to play often, it only needs two things... -A reduction in turret damage and boost to broadside damage -Mods If those two things are handled, or just the mods so someone can mod it to be less turret-heavy, this game will be an absolute replay on my list after I finish it.

Poking beneath my review window, I see another review centered on the same key element: you can't go up or down. The solar systems are pancakes. Your ship can rotate right or left and you can change your speed, but reality ends there. At times, this feels like the old boardgame "Ironclads," a USA civil war simulation, than a battle that transcends planents and stars. That does NOT mean that the game isn't fun. The mix of economic decisions, the choices in which types of missions your skills and your ship's capabilities can handle, and story missions that will occasionally test your skills in all of those elements at once...It's hella fun, is the long and short of it. The graphics are about all my older machine could handle, so I personally had no real complaints there. YMMV. Reasons not to buy: * you are a hotshot pilot in spaceship sims and want another reality to test your 3d dogfight skills * you don't like seeing things blow up * you're broke and have to choose between this game and food * your doctors told you that you have two weeks or less to live (it took me a little longer than that to finish) That last reason is iffy: if you're going to go, why not do it while blasting a space pirate? Cheers

You really can't judge a book or in this case a game by it's cover. Rebel Galaxy has a great soundtrack, the story is simple and to the point with some interesding characters. The story manages to be unique and at the same time create a sense of nostalgia for someone like me who loves the tv show Firefly and Farscap. Simply put western space scifi. The gameplay can be a bit challenging at first but as you play and get better ships with more weapons the game gets easier.

I just finished playing the story line (at version 1.08); I have a number of comments: - Saving options misleading and inconsistent: The Main menu (outside a game) has a so called 'Manage saves' options. This is a misnomer, the only thing it allows you is to delete an existing game: 1 game, 1 save, no manual saving at any time. The information messages appearing now and then tell you incorrectly that it saves automatically when you dock any station, but actually it does when you dock, leave a station, or exit the game at any other point by its own exit option. Due to the above I exited my first game in a no-win situation, with the intention to reload from the last station, to find out that I could only reload from the same point; I ended up deleting this game and starting a fresh one. The ONLY option in such situation is to deliberately get your ship destroyed WITHOUT exiting, at which point you do resume from the last station you docked at. - Escort missions are buggy: They require you to go into 'Paired warp' mode, where you get no control; if you accidentally break the paired warp mode for any reason, the mission fails. I have seen the paired warp mode broken by the game itself a few times, for instance when one of the ships is forcibly dropped out of warp but not the other; I found that this can happen either way, and will frequntly occur when the escorted ship starts or get through an asteroid field or one of the many disturbance areas. In one case, my ship was in paired warp mode, still stuck in an asteroid field and unable to find its way out (kept hitting asteroids due to some bad pathfinding) while the other ship was already out of it and making tracks without mine. The escorted ship will sometimes drop out of warp to turn 90 degrees and go attacking a group of hostiles it did not need to (seen once in the story escort). - The story line is disappointingly short: It has few stages, each only need you to get enough combined defences and firepower to survive it; one of the last stages is an Escort mission mentionned above, which starts at random location on a certain map (I had to retry it several times in a row, until one attempt started in free space and had only 1 interruption without any other ship in sight). Once the story ended (you get a dialog with your aunt), you end up in a free mode with just the random base missions; I finished the story itself with just the bigger trade ship (Heavy class), only moved after that to the biggest ones (Very Heavy). - The game is replayable: I will replay it at some point in the future, using a different ship then the one I used this time; surviavl strategy depends a lot on the ship itself and its equipment. You start the game being hostile to various faction, but in theory you could take carefully chosen mercenary missions to fix those status; I might try that soon anyway as it will require a lot more patience than the standard mode. - The team is apparently still working on the game: There was an update through GOG a few days ago, but I found no information regarding the content of that update. In theory, a new story plot could be added (starting some after the first one); I have however no information concerning the team's intentions on that regard.