Rebel Galaxy: all lightsabers, no browncoats

"Although it feels all-right it's still fake"

 

If Rebel Galaxy dated from the late '90s, I'd call it brilliant. If it had been made in 2010, I'd call it an avant-garde return to player-directed gameplay after the 2000s obsession with linear FPS slogs and MMO grinding. Given however that it came out in 2015, at the same time as Kerbal Space Program and three years after FTL, I can't really dredge up more enthusiasm than a tepid acknowledgement of mediocrity. It attempts to sell, to differentiate itself from the competition, based on a couple of scant superficialities - country music and broadsides - instead of any new features or at even creative re-imagining of old features.

You are a space captain. Except you're not. You're a space gunner with target assist and also a primitive helmsman steering a space-boat two-dimensionally. This is the high-friction space we've all grown to groan at, complete with EVE-style asteroid clumps and zoom-zoom warp drive effects... all of which might be excusable only in a game whose focus lay elsewhere. The immediately and loudly touted combat mechanic of charging up broadside volleys to crack open enemy capital ships is at a second glance revealed as nothing more than a standard arcade-style charge-up attack or FPS right-click zooming to land a shot. Captaining a large vessel would mean making strategic, tactical, resource and personnel decisions upon careful consideration and forward planning. Rebel Galaxy's just a simpleminded Space Invaders knock-off. At least it does include locational damage with forward, side and rear shields and armor, but that's just making me want to reinstall BattleTech instead.

Of course it does also couch these mechanics in a greater web of randomly-generated mission-running, bounty hunting and asteroid mining, but as rewarding as that routine can be, others like Mount&Blade offered more variety in the logistics, enemy types and terrain or other secondary considerations, five or ten years before.

 

This leaves us with the real reason Rebel Galaxy receives such gushing fanboy reviews: the space western aesthetic, complete with a soundtrack of rockabillies croonin' 'bout bein' bad boys and done wrong by fake love, etc. Except "space western" is an idiotic idea, quite possibly the most ridiculed misinterpretation and misuse of Science Fiction's potential since the '50s, Star Wars at its worst, at its most trite and cheesy. Firefly demonstated it is possible to get right, but did so by limiting the science fiction elements (e.g. no space opera wrinkly human aliens, no "warping") and restructuring the interplanetary setting as a civilization in decline, a postwar wasteland, a capitalist high-tech core with beggared neighbours, all serving to explain the otherwise highly unfeasible career of a smuggling interplanetary tramp steamer, a narrative necessity which seems completely lost in Rebel Galaxy's idiot appeal. Firefly even explicitly sidelined technological marvels like laser pistols to avoid the "fire laz0rz, pew-pew" mindset of interchangeably substituting lasers for bullets or spaceships for horses into which spacewesterns otherwise inevitaly fall.

I will concede one point of style: despite country rock not being my cuppa', Rebel Galaxy had the right idea in unabashedly pushing a distinctive soundtrack - though using songs with lyrics is an iffier choice, as they get older quicker by repetition. It's something I've repeatedly wished better games would have the courage to do. In fact, given its release year and (if not expansive) enthusiastically vocal following, Rebel Galaxy quite likely contributed to other developers' gradual shift away from the strict notion of limiting game music to generic, faded placeholder audio which dominated from ~2005-2015.

Still, there's no particular reason to buy or play Rebel Galaxy.

If you want spaceship command with randomized encounters and no pretense of realistic physics, play FTL.

If you want Newtonian spaceflight, play Kerbal.

If you want randomized mission-running and trade hub price juggling with FPS mechanics, play Mount&Blade.

Even if you want an oversimplified version of all that, a knock-off EVE-Online missing 90% of its functionality, it's still not worth investing in this five dollar game in a ten gallon hat. Just the following year, No Man's Sky came out, and for all its flaws incorporated all of Rebel Galaxy's gameplay as a mere afterthought... minus the space rockabillies.