Rebel Galaxy

Despite its flaws it is a nice little game for now and then. Don`t expect two much, it is not comparable to an average space sim like Descent Freespace. Think of Sid Meier`s Pirates! and its 2D-naval fight system, just with spaceships. Rebel Galaxy has a small decent campaign and a good gear and trading system, some nice designed missions and even a basic economy system. Good shipdesign (Eve Online`s shipdesign for example i think is horrible) and some funny synchronized Aliens. Unluckily the `worldbuild` is a little, well anitquated. We (human) good, other (all Aliens) not good. Means boom. Nowadays the term "release" has less and less meaning and so I hope Rebel Galaxy sells well enough to give the small Indie Studio the opportunity to continue development and hopefully create a content patch. Would be nice. Of course I don`t have any clue what their future plans are. Just some additional multi-part missions, a better camera control, and just a little bit more details and variation to the existing content. But maybe I`m just a spoiled nitpicking idiot. Oh and they use awesome music I know partially from Bioshock 3: Blues Saraceno and other similar interprets. Reminds me of the TV-Show Firefly and has let me grin through out the first hours of gameplay simply because it is really great music, I think the term is Western-Sci-Fi So? Not perfect, but a very nice attempt to the Sci Fi Genre that I love so much (yep fanboyed myself). Would consider to buy Rebel Galaxy 2.

So I actually bought another game in the summer sale just to get this one for free -- I was way more interested in this game than the one I bought oddly enough. Anyway, the developers clearly love Firefly. From the country / rockabilly music to everyone having cowboy accents. I was totally jazzed -- I love Firefly! And it definitely has a Privateer vibe -- I loved Privateer! So great start... The atmosphere in the game is perfect, the story is reasonably interesting. Many people have mentioned the fact that you only travel in one plane; basically, you are restricted to 2D motion in a 3D universe. This doesn't bother me necessarily; but what does bother me is the bad guys can go wherever they want. They are not restricted to the 2D plane. This makes keeping up with them, at times, really unnecessarily difficult and it makes me feel like a sitting duck. It also makes asteroid fields really obnoxious to navigate and combat in asteroid fields super unfair :P Combat itself is utterly, blatantly, boring. It is completely and totally dull; I hate it. There's no skill involved, there's nothing to do. You just get hammered on while you hammer other ships. You're constantly swarmed, there's no real way to dodge or avoid other than to use the deflector which is temporary invulnerability. Everything's flying circles around you in 3D while you're stuck in 2D land, and all enemy ships take forever to actually destroy. Maybe its the fact that I've just started and don't really have many combat options, but, at this point, I hate combat. I just always run and resent combat interfering with whatever I actually want to do. I really want to like this game, but I don't see playing it much longer simply because the combat isn't even a little tiny bit fun for me.

This is a strange game though it do the few things it want to do right. Rebel Galaxy isn't Freelancer and isn't Starpoint Gemini, it is its own. You're piloting a ship that is always larger than a gunship and there is a certain feel that ensure the controls feel like it is really a capital spaceship. While you're forced to play on a 2D plane but honestly I never really used the 3D environment in any space-battle game where I'm controlling a capital ship. While there is a selection of different activities the game is generally about fighting. Maybe it is exaggerating to say the combat is special but it has its unique charms. The broadsides feel good to fire, the turrets give the ship some kind of oh-yeah feeling especially in numbers. All the weapons can be controlled manually at will or you can give them order to automatize them, the broadsides however work only manually. Broadsides can be fired rapidly with minimal to zero accuracy or with slow precision. Turrets usually good for anything and during the first hours those going to carry you to the point you can buy good enough main weapons. Getting better stuff can be monotonous. Doing missions that are generaly far away so it takes time to reach the area, and the story alone never award enough credits to upgrade your ship. The story is kind of naive yet complex in a sense. This is what looks like Firefly's to me. It is a bit random and honestly its complexity was forced in rather than having a natural flow of lore. The weakpoint of the game is the very simple AI. A fighting AI can do two things: either going full offense or full defense. Earily they can effectively swarm you and destroy the ship within seconds, later you can repel the swarm more easily but it makes you exposed to the heavy enemies. Full defense means you have to chase the enemy for minutes to get within range. Then, what makes it a 5 stars game? It really do its job perfectly. More like a non-sense space opera with a lot of "oh yeah" moments.

I started playing Rebel Galaxy with virtually no introduction. Some kind of space combat sim with some quirky characters and a thin plot, why not try it out. And since I've played a few of these, I thought it would be a 6DOF shooter akin to Everspace. Not quite. Or rather, not at all. As far as the atmosphere goes, it's not entirely unlike Everspace, albeit more rebel and less galaxy. But the gameplay is more along the lines of Sunless Sea, if you replace the humble steamer with a superluminal space-truck bristling with weaponry. At first I was really confused at the lack of up-and down-travel; all travel takes place roughly on the orbital plane of the system you're in. It's an interesting design choice, and something of an advantage when you're dealing with a corvette instead of a dogfighter. That's another fun difference. In a game like Everspace you're piloting a tiny one-man craft and generally avoiding warships and other large enemies bristling with powerful weapons. In Rebel Galaxy, you're at the helm of one of those over-armed movable gun platforms. Taking out individual enemy craft is less and less a thing as you move up the scale in ship size and power and quantity of weaponry; more important decisions are to be made in terms of position in combat, managing shields and armor, and so forth. There are looting and trading elements in the game, and the economy can be complex and frustrating (getting a good price on contraband is a hard task when you have to avoid being scanned by the local fuzz, for instance). The system maps are littered with unexplored locations, some with interesting things in them. Rebel Galaxy doesn't feel quite like a vast universe, but it's an engaging one with some uniqueness that set it apart from many other space shooters out there.

If there's one word to describe Rebel Galaxy, it's cool. I learned of it years ago, back when I only had Intel HD Graphics that could barely play it with everything set down to minimum. To this day few games offer the player an opportunity to buy, upgrade, charter, and engage in serious ship-to-ship combat in his own full size spacecraft. Being partly procedurally generated, Rebel Galaxy has considerable replay value and I've completed it a few times especially now with new Xe-based Intel UHD Graphics that can sustain frame rates in the 70 range. The design is photo realistic and fun and the battles are superb both visually and in terms of audio. I've never experienced such awesome looking and sounding explosions and they're highly satisfying to inflict on other spacecraft. Even better played with headphones. If you're into naval style space games and tired of flying X-Wing fighters, grab Rebel Galaxy, give your ship a name, and take on space prates, cargo missions, and solve a fascinating campaign mystery.