Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

There's a lot to like about this game. The setting is colorful, both literally and figuratively, with a unique look to everything that is well-designed. Outlaw and its predecessor lean a little farther into the "country western" aspect of "space western" than I might prefer, but it does make for a distinct feeling, and my damaged ship making the sounds of an old truck with a broken carbeurator is memorable. Gameplay is absolutely solid. Trading has nuance without being an economy sim. Don't get me wrong, I like space sims with deep, complex economies, but this game is aiming for a point somewhere between that level and arcade, and nails it. Similarly, combat flying has a mid-level nuance, with just enough ability/need to watch or alter ship systems, and just enough situational usefulness between the different weapons, to reward a technical/tactical mindset. Someone who wants to just hold the trigger down on their favorite weapon will still be able to find success. Excellent graphics. The starfield in particular has an amazing pop. Laser blasts look great and leave scorch marks. Chunks of ships fly off when damaged to great satisfaction (though this is not reflected in the ship models). The explosions are spectacular and, happily, debris hurts you in you try to do an action movie fly-through. Maybe the best job board I've seen in this genre. As far as I can tell the game does not support flightsticks. That's unfortunate for those of us with good sticks who like mapped buttons and actual throttles. That said, the mouse controls are very good. The game claims to be optimized for control pads, but playing a flight sim that way just would not feel right to me, so I have not tried. Absolutely hate the music, but there's a good variety of it between different radio stations. Naturally I was able to mute it entirely from the options menu, but that also took away the entertaining radio ads. Oh well.

Lots of missions, you can haul, trade, bounty hunt, be a pirate. But you will dog fight! Well implemented with target lock, responsive controls and ship and weapon variety. Not an overwhelming variety, but plenty to keep things interesting.

I played the first RG, and was instantly stoked to find a second game in the series. It entertained even more than the first. Why? The first RG had 2D combat and was easy to master. The second adds 3D combat and is much harder to master. If you want a solid shooter, with interesting characters. This is it!! And support the indie game makers that have truly made some diamonds in the rough.

This game is so much like Privateer that "inpired by" is not the whole story. I loved Privateer and liked the obvious similarities between these two games from the beginning. The mechanics, the missions, the trading all are quite alike. The universe building isn't quite on the same level though. It's basically Privateer in Space-Dixieland including huge gas stations, drawling radio hosts, and a round or two of pool in run-down bars. T Unlike in Privateer there is a greater variety in missions, there is mining (which is superb) and piracy really is an option. It took me some time though to learn the nuances of the game. E.g. I did not know that mining is an option until the second playthrough, when I descovered that there are interesting mining spots on the map without waypoints that you have to zoom in quite near and then manually mark them and navigate to them. Also the weapons didn't quite make sense in the beginning. The game modes are not that easy to understand (I recommend doing the flight training before starting the game to know what is meant by flight assist and weapons assist - I am an old Privateer veteran and made my firt run-through in old school but doing my second on vetran). What really shines in my opinion is the humour of the radio stations. The stereotype presenter of the classic radio station for example or the honest ads just make me laugh again and again. I still don't like the colourful art style but you can't have everything I guess.

There is a lot to say about retro revivals, some just go full retro because their genre was tied to the tech used at the time like most 2D platformers. Some like spacesims chafed unter the reduced resolution and the compromises of running on a 286 CPU. Privateer was one of those games, while it fared incredibly well to the point I find it fun even if I didn't grow up with it (X-wing kid here) it still had a lot of limitations. In many ways this feels like a full 3D engine remake of Wing Commander Privateer, the look is intentionally grungy and colorful to emulate that particular look of the old Wing Commander engine but without the limitations. The basic gameplay is very similar but improved in basically everything: money-making activities are more varied, combat is more in line with Freespace or X-wing, some weird limitations and jankiness are gone. There are also a few more basic ship types compared to WCP with some variants unlockable through a sidequest (listen to the GTA-style in-game radio, there's an ad to guide you to it). The game has also more options for controls, while M+K controls are apparently iffy (note: I can't play a spacesim M+K to save my life in general so I can't really judge those) the game makes extensive use of radial menus to allow for a gamepad but has also a more than decent HOTAS support with plenty of optional bindings to bypass most menus. Note that the game can be anabashedly retro in many aspects, the difficulty only influences the availability of control aids (third person camera, auto-pursuit and autoaim) and the starting equipment. The indie nature of the title is only betrayed by a few things here and there like the few voice actors, overall this is a really polished game that set out to do its thing without losing sight of the goal and succeeds: if you grew up with these games in the 90s give it a try, if you didn't it's still a nice romp through retrofuture space USA that can be over in about 45 hours if you do everything.