Rebel Galaxy

Beautiful combination of Freelancer, Privateer and the naval combat found in Assassin's Creed. This game is outstanding! Instantly became one of my favorite games of all time. I'd recommend using an Xbox gamepad. Those controls feel really solid. (I own this game on Steam)

This is one of those games where I get so caught up in the gameplay loop that I forget about the story and just play the game for the sake of playing it. Really, this game is actually a pirate ship simulator in disguise--there's the combat, yes, which has you angling for that perfect broadsides, but there's also the trading part of the game, where you're constantly buying low and selling high throughout the solar system. In addition to that, there's space mining asteroids and upgrading your ship to do, it hides its pirate-ness well. It lacks a little polish here and there, but it makes up for it in the funness factor. Very addicting, I love it.

Space action game with fairly simple mechanics. Good graphics and fantastic music. Runs well and keeps you interested even if some aspects of it are a bit slimmed down. Procedural content keeps some variation. For both good and bad you are however stuck on one plane. Camera can sometime make things a bit confusing. In general I do like it. It has a nice feel to it. The story is a bit thin but it will do I guess. Being an indie game from a small studio this is an achievement of sorts. Even more content in the future could extend life of this gem quite a bit. Well worth both your money and time.

Once you get past the "naval style" 2D combat, this builds on the original "Elite" concept with lots of eye-candy. Would you rather play offline? Do you like to grind? If "yes", then this might be for you. There is no instantaneous travel in-system, so you get occasional "distress beacons" or enemy "warp jammers" to spice things up. It seems geared toward console-style play and holding your hand with "risk assessments". But you can reassign keys if you don't like the simplified default layout, and you can always jump into situations where you're outmatched. I find myself dabbling in different activities to maximize profit getting to the next ship or upgrade. The market system offers some volatility with surplus and shortage events to affect prices, and that can tie into factions or interplanetary war. I wish there was more control over save files. There seems to be one main music track and the vocals can be annoying while repetitive, but the instrumentation is long enough to make it bearable (for me) overall. There is a dialog box that opens with most of the graphics options before the game itself launches, which I like.

I loved it. Very few space sims allow you to play with capital ships which makes it very different (eg: you fire with broadsides). The atmosphere was definitely inspired by Firefly. I can't wait for a sequel of some sort (if there will ever be one). The only downside is that the single player campaign is too short. While it has open-world capabilities and you can just roam the galaxy it gets relatively repetitive after a while but other than that all good.