Rebel Galaxy is a decent space game. Sadly, only decent. This is a great game in terms of atmosphere, they really nailed a sort of "Firefly"-esque Space Cowboy Opera style. The music is perfect and responsible for some of the best moments of the game. The ship designs are great, which makes it a shame that you can only fly about a fifth of all the ships in the game (2 Factions are completely unavailable and no small fighter craft and a couple of others). The horizontal nature of the game, alongside the "broadside"-style combat takes some getting used to, but is ultimately very similar to things Freelancer did. Freelancer seems to be an inspiration for this game in many ways. Sadly, this game falls short of the comparison. First comparison: the story is interesting with a couple (2-3, really) really nice characters, but ultimately very short. Second comparison: the game seems to have a market and some trade routes, but actually is wayy to random (random events are more important than station types) and missions are way more valuable. In Freelancer the right trading made you very quickly very rich. Here, it's a slog and only really rewarding in the beginning of the game. When you can get 1 million credits with a mission in later systems, why bother trading for peanuts? Third comparison: Exploration. As this game features randomly generated star systems (I wasn't aware when I got this game), there is no real exploration. You run across cargo containers so often, that it takes the fun out of it, and they are the only real worthwhile reward. The game is impressive for the fact that two guys created it, its atmosphere is great, the combat is messy and fun but in the end, it was a somewhat shallow experience.
