I first reported on Rebel Galaxy back in May, when studio Double Damage previewed their highly ambitious open world space sim. I say ambitious because the title is a huge undertaking by two-man studio team Travis Baldree and Erich Schaefer, who were responsible for games like Torchlight and Diablo. Now, two-man studio might be slightly misleading (The credits state some contract workers and other assistance), everyone who worked on the project could comfortably fit into a minibus on weekend trip to Vegas. This makes it all the more impressive that Rebel Galaxy is big, beautiful and ambitious. Very ambitious. And how does this aspirant undertaking come together? Honestly, they may have bit more than they chew, yet despite somewhat numerous but small shortcomings, they managed to pull off a title that’s going to be hugely appealing to some and still pretty good for the rest of us.
Rebel Galaxy brings you to the far reaches of colonized space when your aunt Juno sends you a call for assistance, leaving you with a well-used space ship to haul yourself out to the frontier. Nobody’s quite sure what’s become of your dear ol’ auntie, but it seems that a piece of proto-civilization technology she has discovered has some unsavory types very interested. There’s a main quest to the game, but for much of your time you’ll be left to go find your own adventure as you pilot a capital ship (Read, big ship… And eventually a really big ship), taking on missions, buying and selling commodities across worlds, mining (an unbearable low point) and hunting dread pirates. From the get go you’re going to be free to play pretty much how you like. Want to smuggle illegal cargo and outrun the system militia? You can do just that and align with pirates and and brigands. Or you can be the hero, battling invading scourges and defending the local citizenry from terror. It’s your call.
But before you even attempt to cross lasers with an enemy captain you’re going to want some upgrades. At the start of the game you’re actually going to be so pitifully weak that I wasn’t sure what kind of cruel masochist Rebel Galaxy was intended for. You’re going to have to make a few trade runs, but once you have some credits in your pocket you will be ready to take advantage of the game’s most fleshed out components – Upgrades. A recurring theme in this review will be a lot of good ideas that didn’t quite get fleshed out, but this is the game’s one exception. There’s a lot of stuff you can put on your ship, from missiles, mine-launchers and plasma cutters to rocket boosters, armor plating and jump drives. There is a lot of customization that will change how your ship functions in combat, whether you want to blast enemies with precision broadsides from afar, or get close and dirty and hammer them with onslaughts of missiles and flak cannons. Furthermore, once you’ve saved your pennies you’ll be in line to buy new ships which will also drastically change the way you play, whether you want lithe and maneuverable or lumbering and impenetrable, a satisfyingly huge array will be provided as you progress.
All those options are good, because you’re going to be doing a lot fighting. The idea behind combat in Rebel Galaxy is that you are not a lithe, agile dog fighter, but a menacing powerhouse with big, heavy guns. I believe the press kit said the game sought to evoke the feeling of big WWII-style ship battles in space. This is partially accomplished by only allowing your ship to move on the horizontal plane (As in, it doesn’t go up and down, only left and right, back and forth). When I first picked up the preview this felt a lousy design choice, given that you would expect spaceships to move in three dimensions, but after a little bit of time it feels less like a failing and more like the deliberate design choice it was meant to be. The game feels right on it’s single plane. When it’s time to do battle your ship will have numerous turrets position at different hard points, offering different advantages like shield-cutting or high rate of fire, but the star of your show will be your big broadsides. You will spend most of combat trying to angle your ship to get your biggest of big guns in line with other capital ships so you can let loose with big barrages that will obliterate your enemies. The size and relatively slow movement of your capital-class ship means that combat is less fast, frenetic action and more of a slow burn. That isn’t to say the game isn’t without excitement, but it’s more a tense, white-knuckle-grip-on-the-controller suspense as you try to outmaneuver other captains, evade fighters and position yourself to nail the enemy with your big guns. There were plenty of high-strung encounters where I held my breath waiting to see if my shields could hold out just a few seconds longer to get me into position for a deciding blow, and when those moments do occur it’s extremely satisfying.
This is by and large a lot of fun once you have a ship with enough firepower and shields to engage in some real battles, but there are also a few things which hamper the good times. Most frustratingly is targeting; you designate a target by rotating the camera towards an enemy…sometimes. The internal logic by how targets are selected is not at all intuitive and it’s hard to understand why you’re looking right at the torpedo boat in the middle of the screen but the game has chosen to target the bomber off in the top left corner, or worse yet when you’ve set your sites on one ship and the targeting suddenly chooses another ship to lock onto. Along the same lines I found too many instances where a few enemies gathered close together meant that no matter how I angled my view some ships could just never be targeted. This becomes a real frustration and definitely made some battles more miserable than they had to be, especially when trying to clear out fighter ships before engaging with the bigger foes and it could all be solved with a button to cycle through targets. There are some other small annoyances, like unclear reasons for why an automated turret seems to work sometimes but not others, or not being able to hire more than one fighter escort; these aren’t huge complaints, but for a game where the meat and potatoes are ship combat they feel like they deserved to be more polished.
Space is big in Rebel Galaxy, big and open. The galaxy is broken up into numerous planetary systems which are accessed through jump points that connect one another and each system is huge. To travel from the end of one system to the other via normal spaceflight would take a little over two hours of your life by my calculations. In order to cross vast expanses of space you’ll use your warp drive to zip from point to point… Well, not exactly zip. Being launched across space actually takes more time that I would like, especially given that you will be cutting back and forth from points A, B, and C for every single mission. Warp travel doesn’t generally consume more than a minute or two, but because there is so much travel it can quickly add up to the point that it becomes frustrating. You can be ambushed from warp drive, or intercept distress signals and communications while traveling, and I suspect that is why it doesn’t go at a much faster speed, but for the most part you’re just going to be looking at a distance meter counting down because there’s pretty much nothing else to do.
Perhaps travel would be a little more exciting if there was only more to discover in each planetary system. You will occasionally stumble onto pirate attacks, friendly traders and asteroids full of resources for mining, but not much else. For an open world game there’s not much to explore. Given the studio’s limited staffing I can imagine that it would be prohibitively time-consuming to fill every map with nuanced content, but it feels like a shame to have this beautiful, expansive universe with so little to find.
And it really is a beautiful universe, too. The vast expanses of space are filled with glorious colors, and even small things like the flare of a star eclipse by a planet or the haunting lights of space nebulae make the setting, though tragically empty, really lovely to look at. Rebel Galaxy has plenty of character to match, but I fear it doesn’t come on strong enough to really build the world I think the developers had in mind. There’s a frontier rebel vibe that the game establishes pretty well with it’s bluesy, southern hard rock and bartenders who greet you with “Howdy, partner”, but beyond that there’s never much that makes me feel like the world is alive or with personality. In fact, after the twentieth time the song about the Devil and his train (The Devil is apparently a big rail enthusiast) cycled around, I started to wish for less distinct, electronic music to blend into the background. Thankfully the game’s small soundtrack can be offset with custom tracks, which is needed for a title as long as this with only a few dozen tracks. Again I can understand how such a small team may not be able to devote as much time to world building, especially in a game where the story isn’t at the forefront for much of it, but a little more depth could have made the setting pretty standout.
All these complaints aside (And I could keep listing them, like the listless commodity system or inconsistent autosaves), there’s something satisfying about the whole package that still makes this game a lot of fun. I never did get over the monotony of long-distance travel, or make peace with bad targeting, but every time I got a hold of new weaponry, or upgraded to a newer, fancier ship, or destroyed an enemy ship just moments before he destroyed me I felt a giddy sense of excitement. The game doesn’t do a whole lot to keep things fresh, you buy new guns to fight bigger enemies to get more money to buy bigger guns, but the pattern is satisfying and despite the flaws I kept coming back for more. The game will retails for $20 and that feels like a steal for the amount of time and effort that clearly went into it, even if some parts are better than others, and I’ve already put 20 hours in with a lot of game left to play.
Overall, Rebel Galaxy has some problems, but you can feel that the developers really liked what they were doing. It’s going to be more appealing to some than others, and if space sims and trading soy paste is already anathema to everything you enjoy then it has nothing to change your mind, but I think some fans of the genre are going to find a lot to love about the polished looks, wealth of upgrades and unique take on ship-to-ship combat. For me, it’s a title that takes some time to warm up to and doesn’t always deliver everything I want, but when it does the things it’s good at it really is a pretty good time. For what they’re asking I think it’s a pretty good value, and even if you don’t play it from start to finish I think there’s a lot of fun to be had.
