It is a good game at its core, the mechanics are pretty tight; movement feels good, platforming is pretty smooth and not obnoxiously difficult, and the world building and writing is excellent (especially the in-game videos/messages). The game revolves around you exploring, getting upgrades for your suit and platforming your way around, to get the primary exploring objective done, which is actually pretty well focused. There's loads of areas in earlier stages that are clearly designed for you to return with new equipment to revisit and explore. Because the story and narrative is well done and focused, it can be a short game. I did mine in about 7.5 hours. It sounds short, but thats honestly about right, you run out of story, which is fine! The story is great, lets not ruin a good thing. The issue is, that once youre done with the story, re-visitng and exploring the world (without a map or able to place markers) is very tedious, especially with loads of platforming. Other than the main quest, there's very little else to do, and there's not much incentive to do much else, other than achievement hunting. Ther'es also no pause function, which is annoying. Get on sale, you'll have a good weekend with it , especially if you like platforming games. Don't get it thinking its Subnautica or No Man's Sky.
If you're a Homeworld fan, you already know what to expect; expect soundtrack, protecting supply lines and making a deathball to attack the enemy while microing your damaged units. It still the same Homeworld, just 2D now with a far more interactive carrier. Some say its short, it sort of is? it took me 10 hours to finish, but the story is tight, its cohesive and it flows well. I honestly would say adding 3-4 more hours to this would have felt like they were dragging out the story. The big difference the game has over the previous HW titles is that you can no longer hang around the battlefield to gather up all the resources before moving on to the next mission, so you will next to macro-manage your forces, resource gathering and making sure both are protected at the same time. Combat is where I think it could use refining and loses points; you have limited styles of units but each has special abilities so has the potential to be a micro-intensive game, but the game never really offers you the time nor the option to do so, and combat feels a bit repetitive by the late game, with the big cruisers dominating the field, thus removing the need for a number of smaller units.
Like many others I played Rebellion back when it came out in 1999, but I think its more than nostalgia; Rebellion is actually a pretty good 4X-lite. It lacks the sheer complexity of the really deep 4X games like Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron, but there's a lot of empire management going on; building fleets, garrisons, resources, scouting the map, using special forces to abduct enemy characters, sabotaging their buildings and units. You can never really play the game on fast because there's so much going on, but it's never overwhelming and it just hits the right spot. You may experience graphical glitches (even back in 1999 this was a problem). In my game I couldn't do the space battles, so I often just auto-resolved it, but that's much less of a problem than it sounds because you will be auto-resolving a lot of battles anyways. Ground battles are always auto-resolved. There's no real singe player story like Empire At War, and if you want a fancy game that's got pretty space battles, you should go get Empire At War instead. However I found Empire at War very lacking in depth and got bored of it quickly, where-as Rebellion has a lot more replayability. Honestly, dont let the negative reviews about the graphic glitches stop you, it is a good game at its core with good solid game mechanics and there's a reason why many Star Wars fan still play this game after 22 years on the market.
