I like the clean art and graphics and the cold war aesthetic, and it's interesting to see a more in depth air combat system. That said, it completely lacks the atmosphere of the games it was inspired by. There's no suspenseful music to go along with colorful and frightening alien designs. The sound design is weak and lacking. The UI is very clean, yet somehow manages to be unintuitive and hard to read. Now onto the game: It feels like a lot of RNG right from the start and not in the fun way. You have no idea whether you are doing things wrong or if the difficulty is part of the narrative. Many of the first ships you detect on radar will easily outspeed you, absolutely wreck your aircraft when not on autobattle. You would think the early game would slowly ramp up like in the UFO Defense. That's just good game design, but here you are thrown into a pool and left to figure out how to do things. Problem is you can't respond to many events sometimes because your craft can't even reach the areas far from your base. There's such a fine line between buying enough personnel vs not enough which will quickly cripple your efforts. The ground combat suffers from similar tedium and randomness. Your troops just plain suck and you only get 8 of them to begin with. I often found myself missing shots from point blank and aliens spraying across the map and getting lucky instant kills. They are also stronger than your troops in every way. Without the horror element like in the original it simply felt annoying instead of scary. I can't imagine having a fun playthrough without save scumming and dumping hundreds of hours into it. Never had that issue with OG XCOM or TFTD. The journey is long and it isn't enjoyable.
At least it was free. Basically this is a myst style point and click, except that items are hidden in unreasonable places you can only find my combing every pixel of the screen, nothing makes logical sense, and there is no character to the dialogue to make it worth playing. After spending forever gathering what few items I could find in the first room and using them on everything I could find and with each other I just quit. Just not worth the effort, especially when the narration is an unfunny attempt at droll humor. Items names will be hard to decipher as well. What is a goaler? Strange terminology and slang being used. And if you're wondering how bad it could be here's a quick summary of my short playthrough. -Start in room, wtf is a goaler? -Find smoke detector- Ah! Got to set this off to escape room. -Hunt forever to find matches which only appear behind the apple bowl when you click the tiny area prompt, even though the camera circles around the model and shows nothing. (Get used to this, nothing appears even though logically you'd think it would) -Try matches on detector "Hurr it's a smoke detector not a flame detector!" -Try to set mattress on fire -Find spoon under chair, drink soup, gain access to bathroom. Find newspaper behind toilet. -Set fire to the paper? Nope. This was followed by some more effort hunting for more items and trying things with other things. It's terrible.
RG started out very promisingly, especially since I love the truckers-in-space aesthetic. The system you start in ramps up well, but after you leave it becomes incredibly grindy. There is tech scaling, so basically the highest type of tech you have, even if you only have one, influences the level of enemies that appear. I suddenly found myself getting smashed instantly. And it's like this every tech tier. There is no steady ramp up now, it's like climbing rungs of a ladder and it's painful. Doesn't that sort of go against the point of grind mechanics? Money making gets especially difficult later on. I've read that there are tricks such as mining certain things, but I haven't had luck at all with those drops. The 2D plane feels a bit limiting if you prefer other space titles, but it does simplify things a lot. Basically a lot of this game feels like simplified systems of other games like Master of Orion. Trade is pretty basic and there aren't too many resources to keep track of. Various events and blockades can affect the value of things. Combat is quite fun, visually reminding of Homeworld games and there can be a lot of ways to approach combat. However, the aforementioned level hurdles usually mean you get into quick wins or quick losses. It can be frustrating to have to fly all the way out for a mission that says "Low risk" and then get annihilated on arrival because it turns out the enemies are far more numerous and better equipped than it would suggest. Overall Rebel Galaxy is fun at the beginning and I still feel intrigued enough by the story to keep playing. However my enthusiasm has waned significantly due to constantly increasing grind times. A good game should manage grinding without forcing players to stay away from the plot for hours upon hours not of their own accord. If you dislike grinds, this will probably turn you away. But I got this game for free, so my disappointment is curbed.
