This game is one of my favorite grand strategy games I have ever played (the Star Wars theme is a major plus). It can be an immersive experience and the best part of the game are the stories you can create with your strategy to dominate or liberate the galaxy. Wanna assassinate Wedge Antilles? Sabotage a Death Star with a strike team? How about building your ultimate legion of Star Destroyers with the ability to rename each ship? This game allows you to do that! If you were disappointed by Empire at War's dumb down grand strategy element, than you'll like what this game has to offer. However this game isn't for everyone. After playing multiple playthroughs of the game, I can see why it was so polarized by gamers when it first came out in 1998. It's very unforgiving to newer players and the game doesn't hold your hand to go over the basics of the game. I had to read multiple guides just to get a grasp of how the game mechanics worked. The UI and message system is also very inefficient. You'll find yourself clicking the game speed to very slow consistently just to catch up with messages you receive and this really intensifies at harder difficulties and bigger galaxies. In other words, you're not playing this game right if your hand doesn't hurt after a long session. The real time space battles aren't very pretty to look at and are mind-numbingly difficult to control thanks to the inefficient UI and camera the game has for those battles. Most of the time I would just auto-resolve them if my fleet had a superior advantage. On a positive note, I did enjoy having my Death Star insta-killing rebel capital ships in one shot in the real time battles. If you are more into real time strategy games, I'd recommend both Galactic Battlegrounds and Empire at War. Rebellion is a very rough diamond, but once you understand the how the game works, you'll appreciate what it has to offer and become immersed by its expanded universe.
