Rebel Galaxy

Most of the quests are procedurally generated, with only a handful of different templates, this can make the game pretty repetitive and generally I'd say it's a deal breaker... BUT! The gameplay is so good, you won't mind fighting space pirates over and over again :D A thing that would (possibly) make the game even more awesome is mod support, which hopefully could fill the game with some more content :)

There's a major problem in this game that wasn't present in much older games like Windog Commander: it's basically a 2D shotter. You're stuck to a horizontal axis and that's, in my opinion, a major problem and basically killed the game for me.

The story is very scarce, so the rest needs to rely on gameplay. It's functional and the broadside mechanic with a possibility to set your turrets to behave in certain ways is fun. The game is simple, which is a positive for the most part, but in some aspects way too much simple and with limitations that just don’t make sense. The best thing about the whole feeling of the game is that every upgrade you get will make tangible difference. You won't see anything increasing by 2%, like many games do—here you get minimum of some 20%, with gear tier having difference of around double the effectiveness, which is HUGE! You start with a really tiny corvette and get mauled by almost anything and by the end of the game (assuming you work for it, and not race to the end) you end up with a massive dreadnaught, capable of obliterating pretty much anything. The most severe flaws are balancing some of the quests. Defend missions—the bane of players since the dawn of video games—where you are told to protect 3 ships, where each can end up at a different part of nebula. You are almost at the end of the mission, with all of your charges being ok, because you manage to blast each enemy with one salvo, and then enemy warps literally next to one of them and obliterates it faster than you can one-shoot them. This happens ALL THE TIME. At that point, you’ll start avoiding some of the profitable missions, because they are not only impossible, but complete and utter waste of your time due to that and you get nothing out of it.

The game mechanics are simple and fun to play on their own, as it is basically 2D naval combat with a cinematic 3D view of events. There is different weapons, ships, and various loadoats to fit your preference of nimbleness, range, and type of firepower. The music is decent too, but what really sets this game apart is the ability to use any music from your own library for different scenarios (battle, exploration, mining, warping, etcetera). To put that in perspective, I had the Muppets' 'Cabin Fever' song playing while traveling from place to place and when in combat had epic Two Steps From Hell themes such as 'Invincible' playing pumping up the joy of the struggle. Simply awesome! =-D

This is of a certain genre of games that I know is very popular with certain kinds of gamers but that I perosnally find kinda boring. You have a spaceship and you are able to pilot around the galaxy and acquire resources in whichever way you see fit. You can complete deliveries, go mining, collect bounties or just blast away at other ships. It's pretty bare bones but manages to effectively hit all the necessary key points for a space simulation game, and seeing this actually kind of makes me wonder why people are so obsessively interested in games like Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous when this is effectively doing the same type of game with just a fraction of the resources. I'm not familiar with the game 'Freelancer' but I know from a lot of people that that is their favorite game and are always looking for a spiritual successor to it. From what I know of it, this looks like it could effectively be that game. Although I find this style of gameplay kind of boring I didn't have anything to complain about with it mechanically. The only thing is that combat, while easy enough to understand, and functional, could get a little muddled at times. I just felt like the combat never really had a sense of impact. I was always just checking against bars and meters to see what had happened. I never really felt like it was happening to my own ship or the opponents. That said though although it's not really my type of game personally I know that for certain gamers this must be amazing.