I like games like these and saw this one in the gog-sale. But after reading the reviews I was skeptical. I tried it anyway - and played it for many hours. I can confirm that there are severe bugs in this game but after knowing about them it is possible to work around them. The most annoying thing was employees or animals frozen in a location. In that case I had to reload a whole day. Extremely annoying. But it only happened three times. Despite that I am glad I bought this game. I played it for a few dozen hours and probably will again at some point. The story is intriguing and the game mechanics are not bad.
I was sceptic at first but after many hours of fun I can say that this is one of the few games that delivered what they promised right from the start. The mechanics work just fine, the balancing is already good, the story and the atmosphere are great and so are the characters. I have read some negative reviews but I could not find any severe issues as described. There are several smaller issues however like the cursor not focusing on an object you want to open but no reason to dislike this game.
If you think about buying this game you will probably not be surprised when I say that this is a sim city variation. It is focused on a slow pace and has a low complexity in the long run. Like every sim city game it took me a few hours (~5) of trial and error and research to get a settlement running. It was fun including the next ten hours or so of slowly expanding the settlement and introducing the more complex buildings. But after that you experience its limits. Unfortunately I do not see any long term appeal in this game. There are mods but they mostly focus on making the game easier which is definitely not necessary. The game is ok. Not bad and fun to play for a few hours and maybe even more if you enjoy slowly expanding a settlement without unlocking new mechanisms.
I liked the genre and bought the game on sale. It seems like a good new idea for a game at first. But after two hours it becomes very repetitive. The title should have been a hint. In what could best be described as a minigame you watch the hero run in circles fighting monsters and there is little else to do but watch. But you have to repeat it over and over and over again in order to collect stuff in order to improve your base little by little in order to collect more stuff in the minigame. I continued playing for 12 hours in the hopes that building more buildings would make i more interesting but after finishing half of them the game basically did not change. There are indeed several nice ideas for such a simple game and it feels promising but I doubt I with ever play another hour of it.
I like the overall quality of the game. The graphics are good, the writing is good and I have not met any bugs or even glitches. Unfortunately after a few hours I realized I did not enjoy playing it anymore. Maybe the team was so successful capturing the state of futility and tragedy that you start to feel the same way. Somehow every achievement leads to a new problem and I have not found a way to catch a breath. For example you need to collect wood but as soon as you have it you will have to give up large parts of it. So you collect more wood. But the more is being collected without a break the more exausting it gets working in the logging camp. That results in higher negative modifiers and possibly death. So you send an exausted worker to have some rest. But because he is resting he gets bored. Which results in additional negative modifiers. After a while you are juggling storage, buildings, battles, natural resources and character modifiers so much that the game progression itself becomes very slow. You take ten steps forward and nine back over and over again. After some time it also became exausting for me. Maybe the game is more fun if you buy the expansions. Also it may be possible to set the difficulty (which offers one of the best custom modes I have seen so far) to a more appropriate level but I am not sure if I will try either of those.
I had been searching for quite some time to find a good 4X game. Distant Worlds is still the best I have found so far. What I enjoyed most was the complexity. You can start by automating most of the mechanisms and, one by one, choose to control them manually. This is one of the games you have to play for several hours only so you can restart to play with enough comprehension to make acceptable decisions. I still would not give it five stars because it still has some rough edges. The user interface feels sometimes rather primitive. Some automations are just not adequate to be used efficiently. For example in order to build mining stations you can automate your construction vessels. But because they cannot distinguish between good and bad mine choices (ressources you need, amount of ressources on planet, distance, ...) you have to make mostly manual decisions in the early game. In mid game efficiency is not that important any more so you focus on something else but going to the late game you realize that most of them stopped working for some reason and are idle over your home planets. Playing the game it just feels like 3% more development would have made this game a lot better. All in all this is a game I have enjoyed for several hundred hours (on steam). I still bought it here, too because it was worth it.
This game is certainly neither in any way complex nor does it have a mind-blowing concept. There are games out there which have more content, a bigger world, more options, a better story...... . There is no reason why I would recommend buying this. Except for the fact that I really enjoyed it a lot. Rebel Galaxy is like a simple dish that just hit the sweet spot. Fighting, trading, exploring, upgrading, repeat. It just works. For 25+ hours. Then due to the low complexity and repetition you'll want to finish the game. Which is just then possible. Everything is perfect. If you are not looking for a long term engagement which is where it is lacking.
This game is based on a few nice ideas and contrary to what I've read here I haven't encountered any bugs yet. From what I had read I had expected a bit more from this game though. If you take away the graphics and the story this game consists of about three mini games and a lot of time flying in a spacecraft while keeping an eye on dropping ressources. The first few hours were fun but after always losing three of your six NPCs at some point and starting all over it becomes a bit monotonous.
I am not a frequent player of Japanese RPGs but I do like them from time to time. This one is definitely the worst I've played. I liked the game for several hours but after that it started to become more and more annoying. - The game is far from being complex. You could say it doesn't get any simpler than this. You read dialogues without making any decisions and you fight the very same fights over and over again. Yet there is so much I didn't know about for hours and probably still don't. For example abbreviations are not explained at all. I had to find them in a forum where people were guessing what they could mean. - The fights are very simple, always the same, and yet you could probably write an essay about which monster can be defeated best by which combination of the thousands of unnecessary techniques. So of course you could fight the battles using great strategies but you have to invest hours into research just to give this game some form of meaning. - The fights can only be won because of a very limited AI. The most important strategy in this game is to exploit the gaps in the AI and hope that the AI does not, by chance, make a random move and wipe you party out. - In case your party was wiped out you will probably want to reload. This usually happens during major battles. Preceding major battles are major dialogues which can last for minutes. You can fast forward them but it will still take a minute or two because characters moving still move at the same pace. Diaglogue cannot be skipped. - Choosing a mate seems to be one of the goals. It is probably a Japanese thing that all the candidates are girls who are/act like they are between 8 and 12 years old. So my guess is you either have to be younger than 15 yourself if you can listen to them without gagging or you...are into this. The game is better than one or maybe two stars. The first few hours are ok if you like fights and improving your partystats. But after that this game just becomes annoying + boring
