An adventure in wide-open spaces.
With little more than some catchy cowboy-rock background music, Rebel Galaxy effectively creates a frontier atmosphere around its cinematic starship combat. That’s appropriate for a game where you can choose to follow the main quest, or set out in any direction and strike out to make your own fortune as a trader, miner, bounty hunter, or pirate in a huge, procedurally generated star cluster. It brought out my inner Han Solo for a great space adventure.
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The constant barrage of fire makes these feel like big ships.
Even if you don’t take the bounty hunting or piracy routes, most of what you’ll do in Rebel Galaxy involves combat – either attacking other ships or defending yourself from pirates or other hostiles. So it’s important that these 2D battles look and feel good – and they sure do. Because all your ship’s weapons you aren’t directly controlling at any given time are manned by a customizable AI, the constant barrage of fire makes these feel like big ships with a crew that helps you out.
These space boats do move and maneuver a little too fast for positioning to feel really tactical – shield facings aren’t as important when you can quickly spin a damaged side out of the line of fire – but using booster engines to line up your heavy-hitting broadside cannons against the enemy’s weakest shields, while blocking incoming fire with well-timed use of manually activated recharging deflectors, will yield some rewarding results in the form of nice explosions. A decent selection of weaponry, ranging from beams to flak to missiles and mines, allows for some mixing up of tactics.
The biggest problem is that it’s hard to know if an enemy ship poses a threat until it’s already punched a hole in your hull. A threat indicator tips you off to how much danger you’re in right now in general, but not specifically where it’s coming from. And because your shield and armor strength isn’t represented numerically, it’s tough to recognize when you’ve bitten off a bigger fight than you and your single hired mercenary wingman can handle and should make a hasty getaway.
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The starting ship bears a noticeable similarity to Firefly’s Serenity.
There’s a good variety of ships to fight and fly, and most look great and have lots of character. The starting ship bears a noticeable similarity to Firefly’s Serenity (except it’s got guns) and everything from the small corvettes to the huge destroyers and dreadnoughts has more of a lived-in Empire Strikes Back feel to it, as opposed to a disturbingly sterile Phantom Menace style.
It’s good that personality comes across from the art style, because it makes up for the fact that factions have no personalities to speak of. Outside of some nicely voiced talking heads, pirates are basically the same as the alien Greel in that they don’t seem to have any agendas or distinct behaviors. They definitely could’ve used some.
Exploring this galaxy is a big part of the fun, and setting out on a trip begins with a fantastic booming sound effect as your ship’s warp drive spins up and activates. Warping through this vast but colorful and densely packed region of space is rarely dull; nebulae of different swirling colors, fields of asteroids and ice and junk, planets, moons, and of course stars give you plenty to look at. Even though it can take a couple of minutes to fly from one end of a solar system to another, there’s usually a distress call or an unidentified signal to investigate if your trigger finger gets itchy.
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The galaxy feels as big as space should, even though it’s all on a two-dimensional plane.
And space is huge, too. Maps are made up of a dozen or so systems linked together by warp gates. One looks pretty much the same as the next, but each is uniquely populated with faction-controlled outposts. It could definitely be better at making it easy to find the outposts you’re looking for (the list of planets is only available on the sector map, and you can’t select from there – you have to cycle through them one by one on the system map) but it feels as big as space should, even though it’s all on a two-dimensional plane.
It’s especially important to know where you’re going as a trader if you want to get a good price for your goods. I love that the commodity prices are dynamic, and can even be manipulated by intercepting convoys or destroying invading forces that you can find out about in the news screen. But I found it difficult to make much headway as a trader, because it’s kind of a crap shoot. Prices change day by day, but the current date isn’t displayed, so I have no idea how long an in-game day is. And if I get a hot tip that an outpost on the other side of the system is selling an item cheap, it’s frustrating to get there and find they only had one unit in stock. I was able to make some money in that line of work, but not nearly as much as by blowing stuff up.
Mining is, as you’d expect, a pretty straightforward activity of blowing up space rocks and slurping up the goodies that fall out. There’s some nuance to it – once you’re equipped, you’re given specific spots to zap with a mining laser to increase your haul – but it’s still literally shooting at rocks. I’m glad the option’s there, but it’s not how I chose to spend much of my time.
Early main quest missions have some good flexibility that lets you pick between fighting or buying your way out of trouble.
I did spend about 20 hours working through the story missions – there aren’t a whole lot of them, but you need to do quite a few “Go here and blow up everything” missions on the side to upgrade your ship to something with enough punch to take on the next one… most of which also boil down to going to a place and blowing stuff up. It’s not an ambitious story, and the characters aren’t memorable despite some respectable voice acting, but the early main quest missions have some good flexibility that lets you pick between fighting or buying your way out of trouble. That trend goes away once you leave the starting system and you’re forced into battle more and more, but it lets you vary your play style. And once it’s all over, you’re free to continue your own adventures and save up to buy a wildly expensive dreadnought-class ship.
In some ways it’s a bare-bones game, but in the proud tradition of classics like Wing Commander: Privateer and Freelancer, Rebel Galaxy makes a lot out of a little by giving you the freedom to captain your ship as you please and pursue your own fortune in a region of space loaded with pirates and opportunity. While it’s not as deep as it first appears, fun and fast naval-style combat and a vast explorable galaxy made me want to try out each of its different styles of captaining, and kept me happily blasting away.
