STAR WARS™ Rebellion

I would highly recommend this game, especially for anyone that has read many of the Star Wars extended universe novels such as the Thrawn series, Mara Jade, Heir to the Empire, etc. For those who may not know, in the time period between when the original Star Wars trilogy was released and the prequels came out, a great number of books were written expanding on the Star Wars universe. Han and Leia have twins, Luke falls in love with a former sith, there are adventures in search of a lost fleet, new aliens and characters are introduced that sometimes have their own novels, and so on. The characters in this game are drawn from that material, long before anyone even thought that the prequels or later Star Wars movies were ever going to arrive. Being set in a pre-prequels Star Wars universe with extended universe characters sets the game a bit apart from other 4x titles. Those characters play a central role as your researchers, generals, admirals, spies, and commandos, and everything in the game is drawn from the original trilogy or the books. The game itself is a fun strategy game. It has a little bit of exploitable quirkiness in regards to liberating planets from orbit, and the system for advancing time in the game both fits and doesn't, but overall, it is a good and worthy experience. The gameplay centers around a number of facets. Recruiting new planets, building up your industrial base, sabotage and espionage against your foe, exploration, defense, and fleets are your primary concerns in game.

I know I'm not helping much, but the game has no graphic issues on my Windows 7, SP 1, 32-bit laptop.

I am a longtime player of this game. I was getting tired of having a separate Win7 hard drive / install just to play the game, and the drive I have it on is failing. I wanted to try getting this to run on my W10 main box. Using the offline install (https://www.gog.com/downloads/star_wars_rebellion/5747d046cad3177859167db6afe47c01) went pretty smooth. The game scaled and played in full screen without crashes or stutter. I played through a whole Alliance campaign. The only issue I ran into was in battle sequences. All ship's graphics had a bizarre strobing / rainbow color wireframe effect. I was still able to play through to completion, but the only time the game crashed was at the end of the battle going back to the victory screen. Compared to what a pain it's been trying to get my original CD install to run in W10, for 5.99 it isn't bad. If they could just fix the battle sequence it would be 100%.

This is one of my all time favorite games, and so this is going to be a pretty biased review. The game description is a bit vague, but this is really a 4X game at core, with some features being more limited (research always progresses in a certain order, there's a limited number of ship and troop types), and some features being extremely open-ended (fleet management, special operations, etc). The biggest strength of SWR is how it made use of the enormously numerous Expanded Universe materials (this is now known as "Legends"), and the many planets and characters mentioned in various games, comics, books and more. The late nineties were the high point of the Expanded Universe, but this also meant a fair bit of weirdness in what was the SW canon at that point, before the prequels. The strategy part of the game is also pretty good, as it tries to model some realistic concepts: intelligence information gets old, ships need time to get where you need them (sometimes a lot of time), fleets can run away and need to be chased down (unless you have a gravity well ship). The game also tries to have events happen dynamically, but also in a manner roughly similar to how they happened in the movies: Luke goes off to Dagobah to train and comes back stronger; Han can get captured by bounty hunters, and other characters go off automatically to try and rescue him. There's also the famous "Han Solo Effect" where Han gets a speed boost if he's traveling outside of a fleet. The community for this game is also super active and very friendly. There's mods and editors that improve the visuals, change the galaxy map, edit planet descriptions and much more. The multiplayer is also somewhat active, which is great. That being said, you need to like older game design a bit if you're to enjoy SWR. It is not modern, and it is clunky at times, but there's a certain charm that no other SW strategy has managed to meet, in my opinion.

Wookie Jedis.. Nuff said. Game random generates who can be Jedi. Every game is different and the story changes dynamically. Princess Leia can become a Jedi and fight Vader/Palpy instead of Luke. You can build multiple death stars. My only real criticism is that there are systems in this game that are in most cases completely un-necessary, or just outright unusable, hence the flak the game got at Launch. But the amount of stories you can tell with this game is just amazing. Not one play through will be the same because of all the random dynamic stuff that happens. Games run for hours. I've spent entire weeks playing this game in some cases. Really glad to see this game finally on GOG.com.