Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

If you're like me you have played the first Rebel Galaxy and maybe even enjoyed it. I am also a long time player of this genre, space flight sims. I have lots of experience with them and RGO gets a lot of it right, at least on the surface. Give this game a few hours and its flaws are grossly apparent. Specifically the scaling difficulty. Normally a little bit of difficulty scaling makes snese, but this quickly outpaces you to the point when you're busy trying to save up for that first new ship but the enemies you face are based entirely on the money you carry and the upgrade values of your ship components. So this means that you gain money and start saving, but because you don't keep upgrading your ship, the game is more easily able to wipe you. And wipe you they do. Even if you do persue upgrades, you'll always have to fight by the skin of your teeth, and if every fight is that close then the tension just evaporates and instead of exciting, it is excruciating. Within four hours of playing you'll regularly have to fight off 6 or more enemies at once, you have literally seconds or die when you come out of auto pilot and running almost never ever works as the enemies will chase you forever it seems. You really have about two hours of play to learn almost all of this games systems or you are at a disadvantage. Constantly I was getting killed because I didn't know how to do something yet, I was still learning. I really can not understand how developers didn't get feedback like this. Almost every review seems to mention how the difficulty screws over the player. Despite the rocking soundtrack, just don't. Just don't bother with this. You'll be happier if you don't.

If you loved Rebel Galaxy (Hello!) prepare to have the same game but re-skinned and tweaked so it's less fun. If you loved Privateer (Hello!) this game is basically that but with worse combat and more grind. I have some personal stuff I know shouldn't apply here but I'll say it anyway: 1) Gods, but I am fed up of the Honky-Tonk Space Cowboy milieu; the 'Frontier' comparison is lazy, cliched and overworked. Where's my Space Samurai? Space Brits? Space Mexicans? Space Metallers? Space-anything-else?? (Borderlands, please also take note) 2) Dogfighting that consists of endless spinning to achieve a lock is SO 20th century. I'm really done with it. It shouldn't ever come down to boring medieval jousting either. Please, for the love of god, somebody do something more interesting and inventive in this space. Even current airplanes don't fight this way anymore. Back to the game itself: The graphics: are nice, but look more cartoony than the original. I'm not a fan. I do appreciate the retro-style ship HUD but honestly it's designed with so many greebles that do nothing but distract, that I find myself wanting something cleaner and more modern. Mission types are few and repeated endlessly. I can stand only so much repetition before I get bored. Possibly why I haven't missed Privateer or Elite that much: people forget that they're grind-fests. I hate that the intro-movie is 10x more interesting than actually playing the game. Controls are not as intuitive as in Rebel Galaxy. In short: I wanted to love this game, was upset when it went EPIC Exclusive, waited until now to buy it (on sale, for less than a fiver) and am still disappointed with it. Sometimes old games were classics because we didn't have anything better at the time. And sometimes the old is made fresh but without really understanding what made the first game so good (Carrier Command, *coughcough*) This is an example of both, I think.

I loved the first Rebel Galaxy. I put dozens of hours into the game, which became for me a benchmark of good indie game. So maybe my expectations for the sequel were too high. I didn't like the change in combat style, the fast pace, and the cluttered look. I understand that it is a totally different proposal, but I have not been able to enjoy it.

It took me a while to get along with the game. Understanding and mapping controls can be a pain, but after I got this done it was like back in the day, when playing Wing Commander Privateer. The story is not mind blowing, however it does the job to keep you moving forward. There are a few things which annoyed me during the first play thru, but guess what, I started modding the game and solve all my problems xD You can check my full mods colletion at Nexus mods. I've posted 11 so far, with new ships, new HUD's, new modules, weapons rebalance, alternative warp sound and alternative Bloom effect. I still got a few ideas for mods, the only thing missing now is time :)

I like space sims and want to see more of them. This game kinda shows that games like that don't need to be as big of an investment as something like Elite Dangerous. The controls could definitely be more fleshed out, but kudos to them for getting it to work on a gamepad. Still, I had 2 directions on my right thumbstick that could have gone to verticle thrust and any number of instances where I wanted to do exactly that. The lock-on for dogfights takes the challenge away, but you still have plenty to do in a dogfight, so okay. Sometimes a less complicated game is what I'm up for. My only problem with this game was when I started getting wrecked at jump points before the game had finished loading the level. Did they spawn right on top of me? Don't know, because I came in after they seemed to have bounced off me from all sides. Then you realize doing main story missions don't reward you like side missions and the repair cost from running story missions has put you further away from getting the ship you were hoping would be available by now. At that point you realize you aren't having fun, because the game loop only works if you get rewarded at the end (or at least not set back when you win) and the story isn't good enough to make up for it. Or maybe the story is eventually, idk, but the characters weren't all that great. When I was helping Marla rescue Ansel I wished there was a side with Durgan option. At least he acted the part. Pirates are supposed to be jerks and cutthroats, not cooky best buds.