STAR WARS™ Rebellion

I played SO MUCH Rebellion in the early 2000s, it's not even funny. One of my all-time favorite games, and I'm very grateful to GOG for releasing it for modern PCs. If you love Star Wars and empire-management grand strategy, don't mind learning the dynamics and getting used to a unique interface, and don't care about cutting-edge graphics, then this is your game. I think it has aged really well. I did not experience any of the graphics bugs that other reviewers had mentioned. I have only had two problems with this release: 1) the briefing at the beginning cannot be skipped. You have no choice but to listen to IMP-22 or C3PO drone on and on every time you start a new game. 2) I tried playing this on my Chromebook-running-Ubuntu-running-Wine. Unlike many other GOG games (HOMM3, Fallout 1-2, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, to name a few) that work like a charm on that setup, Rebellion sadly did not. It will start, but the resolution gets all messed up and it keeps switching back to the desktop every few seconds. OBVIOUSLY, THIS IS NOT GOG's FAULT! Just letting you, Dear Reader, know in case you were interested in running this under Linux/Wine. I hope there will be a Linux version of this someday. It works just fine on my Win7 desktop.

I'm giving this three stars because I kind of see how it could be enjoyable to someone who played it back when it came out, or who has more patience for figuring out its convoluted controls- the concept is nice, but the execution is cumbersome, slow and confusing. I gave it a fair try to see if I could get into it, but it's just too complex, too abstract, and too boring and slow. This game is in dire need of a series of in-game tutorials, but instead it has C-3PO say a few words and then throw you into the game with no idea what you're doing. There apparently is a tutorial in the manual, but it's a bit much to take in, and I really wish they'd followed the philosophy of "show, don't tell". So to sum it up: maybe good, but I didn't feel like putting in the long, long hours needed to learn how to play- after a couple hours trying in vain to figure out how to properly deploy ambassadors and spies and ships and failing to achieve any desired results, I threw in the towel. I will say that I didn't encounter any of the graphical bugs that people have been mentioning, though.

It gives me great pain to only rate this as one star. Not because the game deserves it, but because the limitations and minor bugs that exist in this version. I loved this game back when I owned it for Windows 95 and got it as soon as I found it here. Unfortunately there are some minor technical issues that restrict your actions (very precise click locations) that are frustrating.

This is in my top two PC games of all time - ecstatic to see it on GOG. When it came out it got mediocre reviews. Why? I'll never know. Most of the spite seemed to be due to "micromanagement" required, but that's misleading. There is so much you can do here, so many strategies that, yes, the learning curve is high. But you can slow turns down and you really don't feel limited. For example, don't have the ships to counter an enemy fleet directly? Send a cheap sabotage mission vs their Star Destroyer. Opponent holding a system only through force? Send an incite uprising mission. Each game is different and it makes for intense multiplayer. Buy it.

I've been playing this game for 25 years now, and I always come back to it. It's a great 4x Strategy game set in the Star Wars Universe. It uses a lot of characters from the old Expanded Universe/Legacy Books.