Rebel Galaxy is a solid space game recently released on the market. Being limited to only 2 planes seems weird at first but you can get used to it. The voice acting is great but the voices seem to have been recorded without using top of the line microphones so if you have music off you will hear constant static whenever someone talks. Additionally to that some songs also have some weird crackling as if they were played on a gramophone. The other big problem is the controls. The game is HEAVILY consolized. Manual turret control is... bad. Very bad. And on top of that the turrets tend to snap to target and that can get annoying when there is a load of strike craft zipping around and your aiming reticle jumping left and right making it impossible to target anything specific. Same thing applies to mining. Your mining laser simply jumps between asteroids while you are trying to get a bead on that one roid with minable resources in the area.
Ok let's get to the point here. Play the story and uninstal the game because unlike games like the X series the entire universe is static and... well sadly boring. It still has some good ideas behind it tho! The ship. While initially a bummer you can upgrade it via artifacts. And you can't upgrade every component to its maximum in one playthough (there are only enough artifacts to max out 2 stats assuming you don't touch the third at all) and those upgrades affect how your ship looks. For example if you put all your points into hull and engines your fighter will pretty much turn into a corellian corvette bristling with automatic turrets. Trading/Mining. Another idea done half right but ultimately becomes boring and tedious. You see since you play as a fighter rather than hauling things in your miniscule cargo hold you have a series of freight drones that attach to cargo containers and follow you around allowing you to trade even in a fighter. Having containers following you slows your ship down but you can just leave them when attacked deal with the pirates and simply reattach them back to your space choo choo and haul on. Mining works in a similar fashion. Fly up to some asteroid and fire at it till it breaks. it might have a nugget of ore inside. Once you find one (or more) just launch a freight drone at it and done. Combat Starts out hard but in my case things started to get trivial once i upgraded my hull. The automatic turrets do their job admirably and with 5 of them i could just ignore the pirates when hauling cargo and they would die before i reach the station anyway with minimal hull damage at worst. Things are likely harder if you turn your craft into a speedster rather than a battleship. Universe The games weakest point. It's boring and streamlined to the point of nausea. You have 5 races all wearing their hats with pride and portions of the universe are locked untill you do a story mission. Additionally "higher level" sectors contain better weapons.
This game is a lot like C&C however it has a lot of twists and often tackles balance problems differently. For one thing the game rewards you for being humane... as in taking prisoners after a fight rather than killing everyone. This brings me to the games biggest twist. You see there are 3 sources of income: Oil - Self explanatory. Oil pump -> Truck -> Refinery Gold - Stationing infantry in banks (It's a pretty nice feature! Allows turning some buildings into fortresses with the right mix of units) lets you tap into its safes. Prisoners - Capturing a prisoner of war not only gives you a bonus cash injection but with hte right reearch it also steals money from enemies. Additionally a prison fully "staffed" also passively generates income (no i have no idea how it works but i would wager on slave labour). So you get some nice diversity with the economy. What about the combat? It's rock paper scissors but again with a twist. You may remember how many times your tank had to shoot infantrymen in games like Red Alert 2 to kill them each shell delivering scratch damage at best? Well it's not the case here because one shell from an abrams pretty much oneshots every infantry unit... however it can't take many kornet rockets in return. And finally airstrikes ships and artillery. You can't control airplanes directly in this game. You can only send them on strafing runs and select the main point you want them to attack. They will then proceed to the target and drop half of their payload on it. The other half is dumped on other targets of opportunity. All in all aircraft are by fat the most powerful and fragile units in the game if you don't count in ships. The expansion pack is a mixed bag. On one hand it overhauls artillery, balances healing units (they were too powerful) and adds mercenaries along with ships but the expansions campaign is punishingly difficult to put it lightly. It's a pretty original (and good) take on the classic RTS formula.
First of all i'd like to actually call this game a roguelike rather than roguelite since endless mode is... pretty much that. You have your hero an unexplored "dungeon" made out of cards some gear and a limited number of food with your goal baing finding the next flight of stairs repeating untill you die. Death however is not a scenario where you lose everything since during your travels in either story or endless mode you might encounter cards with a token tied to them. By performing a certain action you can aquire said token which in turn transforms into more cards for your deck after you die or kill the boss in story mode. Basically almost every expedition ends up giving you extra cards to encounter in later games... and not all of them are good cards. All in all the card part of the game is a giant boon for eventual future development or DLC since adding new cards should be a relatively simple (and hopefully cheap) affair. The combat itself is... ok considering it was made with a gamepads lack of precision in mind so the character often jumps around in order to hit (especially noticable when attacking after a roll) but its generally responsive enough (you can cancel attack animations by rolling) and the times i fell into a trap when rolling were more due to me misjudging the distance my character rolls or not spotting the trap in the first place. My only real gripe is the camera on some (large) arenas not allowing you to see some enemies. This is fortunately somewhat remedied by on screen indicators that show you attacking enemies giving you enough time to roll or counter. All in all i think the game is one of the better recent releases and something to at least check out if you'd like to see how a merge of CCG, Roguelike and Arkham combat plays out.
At the time of its release it was a pretty amazing title. A fusion of CS, Quake with added vehicles (something very rare in games at that time with "Codename Eagle" being pioneers of having vehicles in mutiplayer and Mobile Forcess perfecting the formula... then the Battlefield series happened and mobile forces became its shadow. And going back to MF... it's a fast paced jumpy shooty classic FPS with vehicles being an important feature. There is one problem tho. it was 13 years ago and games moved. Nowdays there are many better titles if you look for a good FPS with vehicles. Renegade X and Unreal Tournament 2004 for example. Still if its on sale i'd say you should check it out anyway. Who knows it might be a hit at a lan party.
I originally started out with high expctations as my opinion of the title was pretty high based on the previews... that took a nosedive as i started just to go up ... and then drop back down again. So we have the promise of a seafaring eldritch themed rougelike. Sounds good? Well first of all if you wanted to play as a mechant please leave and never look at this game again as it was made with insubstainability in mind. You simply can't earn money by trading at all. as the profit margins on trade goods usually won't go over 2-3 echos (the games currency) so even with selling rumours to the admirality back at london it won't cover the cost of fuel and suplies. In effect doing so will slowly drain your resources untill you learn trading is not the way in this game. My opinion rose up once i realized that rather than look for a good trade route i should visit as many ports and simply collect rumours instead making a big loop. Those partially refund you fuel but also lead to mini stories and bits of lore you can profit from... or get hurt by. So after several hours of cruising between islands i decide to upgrade (enemies like lifebergs up north and most things far east can nearly oneshot your ship and take ages to bring down) and suprise! Everything is so b****y expensive! And at this point you find yourself running circuits around already explored isles trying to save up for a better ship and weapon to push the story onwards as most officer stories require you to visit a port in the nort east or south east corners of the map at some point... and your starter ship can't do that. Oh and permadeath is a major feature here... altho i don't think it actually fits the games style. Most games with ironman mode in mind like FTL or the many rougelike indies are made with the ability to come in play for 15 minutes die and get out. SS however expect its players to sink hours upon hours into it only to take away (almost) everything if you happen to die... and you will die.
The title says it all. The game is certainly playable but it's not really finished yet with many placeholders and hack jobs holding the game together... suprisingly ending up with a pretty decent product that can only get better. So what is this game about anyway? Well imagine freelancer with a strong emphasis on playing capital ships. Sounds awesome but the games unfinished placeholder filled nature gets more obvious the longer you play. Factions - The faction system while chock full of factions runs on a simple reputation meter. It works by simply dividing the numerous factions into 2 relatively homogenous camps consisting of good and bad guys. No individual reputations for any group so if you made the (evil) empire like you you will also be liked by just about every criminal group (with some exeptions who are alays enemies) in the galaxy. Even those you never met! Combat - The AI is as dumb as a brick. I can forgive the fact that destroyers cruisers and battleships of all kinds follow a simple tactic consisting of "get close and unload on the sucker" However the same thing applies to.... well every ship. even carriers. Carriers that don't even launch their strike craft! Also as a side effect any wing that's not a bomber is nearly useless since you will never run into enemy strike craft fighters and interceptors are supposed to tackle. Economy - Simply put there are ships flying around but it's not the living economy you seen in X. Instead we get stations that restock instantly once you leave the area... and no actual economy to speak of really. It's a simple system where place X always sells a certain comodity low and planet Y buys it high and no matter what you do neither of them will run out or get overstocked. Why? Well the stocks reset once you turn your back and leave the area! That's why. I'm giving it 4 stars but mostly because the game is still in development and most likely fix some of the things i mentioned... or at least the more glaring ones.
