Rebel Galaxy

Rebel Galaxy has at least the trappings for a fun Western inspired Sci-Fi themed ship combat 'simulator'. I use the term simulator loosely as this really doesn't simulator anything close to ship-to-ship combat. For what, you are only flying in a 2D plane, there is no verticality here. And second, the controls are dead simple and not very challenging. The game at least looks good, but after the okay-to-good voice acting and nice looking ships wears off you have a game without much depth or excitement. Here's how the game works: You receive your first mission from a generic space station. You then proceed to a waypoint on your map, kill some ships, and then go to the next waypoint. You will be doing a lot of combat and sadly it's just not that fun. You have 3 different weapons: Turrets mounted on your ship that you will largely let automatically fire at things, a secondary weapon which shoots some weapons out to the side (not targetable), and then a powerful broadside targetable attack. This broadside attack makes up most of the damage. It's very similar to Black Flag only requires even less aiming. It is mildly amusing at first but gets much worse as the game goes on. All Space Station with very few minor differences are essentially the same. They all have a Bar Tender, they all have a market (really just a list of good you can purchase or sell), and they all have some ability to let you buy new ships or outfit your current one. You will be constantly interrupting when traveling. You'll learn to ignore the distress beacons as the payoff just isn't worth going for. And then there's the grind, you will have to make money some how and there isn't a lot of efficient or more importantly, fun ways to go about it. All the side missions - which are spit out automatically in a procedurally generated fashion, are just facsimiles of each other.

Rebel Galaxy is a sandbox space adventure where the main gameplay loop is to complete missions, earn credits, upgrade your ship and repeat. Fights are generally enjoyable and have a decent level of tactics to learn and utilize. This is the heart of the game and it does it well. The game takes place on a 2D plane so it is more akin to the old seadogs games in terms of ship combat. It emphasizes utilizing broadsides to be effective and, while it feels like an old colonial naval system, it adds enough weapons and gadgets to give it some flair. The music is very well done and the game leans into it heavily to set the tone. The game itself is a very much a bluesy space-western making you feel like you are by yourself in a cruel galaxy where anything can go wrong. The story is decent but lacking and predictable. Most of the characters have little to no development and simply act as placeholders to usher the player from mission to mission. There is a bit of choice involved inside of the dialogue. Ultimately, this is just flavor and while it can have a limited affect on gameplay, it doesn't seem to change the story much. In terms of complaints, I have a few. On the technical side, the game suffered several crashes which were solved through validating files. Not a big deal, but I had to do this 4 times throughout my playtime. Exploration and gameplay can get dull after a while. You quickly discover that you run into the same encounters pretty regularly. The warp system can get annoying with all the constant stops as you are trying to run missions. The enemy curve is confusing at times. The game often can't decide if enemies level based on system, or your ship. Endgame upgrades have little payoff. You spend millions of credits to finally have a big ship just to realize there is nothing left to do in the game but run side missions with no purpose. Overall it is a solid title 3.5/5. It would have been cool to include a new game+ or hard mode.

I call it an oldie but tech has evolved so much since this game. I started with Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, which is the successor, It has a similar vibe, the music is amazing, it sets the tone. It is a game ya gotta grind a bit, but, I felt like, near the beginning, it was hard, you quickly develop your tactics and learn tricks to come out on top. You feel your work paying off as you become stronger and yes it lacks the 6 degrees of freedom 3d space, but actually that can be a strength, some will prefer RBO because of this, but, especially for the current price, you really can't beat it, can't wait to see where the story ends, and to own the really really large ships! See you out there rebels!

I like this game alot, never played something quite like it, really unique. It's sad that GOG didn't include gamepad support, i love playing with the gamepad. There's some third party software that can convert it to be able to play with a gamepad, so maybe i'll try that.

Older now, but one fun and unconventional space sim. The upgrade options and mission diversity make it fun to come back too.