by Marcuse » Wed Nov 01, 2017 1:35 am
I've been playing a little space game I came across that was on sale for £3.40, called Rebel Galaxy. I've only played a couple of hours, so this is more a first impression than any sort of review.
For a game going so cheap, it's a little rough around the edges. The text in particular looks to have been compressed somehow and it's often hard to read. That's not so much of a concern when you're only ever called to read stuff in zero-danger situations on starbases, but it does annoy. There's evidence that the devs have tried to make the game user friendly to interface with, but they've done about 65% of the job, and the rest is a bit clunky to use. Having your ship constantly trying to accelerate to sublight when you want to cruise in and the only way to do that is keep pressing Q to slow down is awkward. Overall it's fun enough to use, and not too annoying.
The gameplay itself is based entirely on ship combat, exploration/commerce, and mining. The combat is fast paced and can be a lot of fun. I only have the crappy starting ship, so I've been dying a lot, but part of me thinks that's partly to do with how the game judges encounter strength. I went for one "low" risk mission, only to find that there's about ten fighter craft who all attack at once and shred me. By contrast, the higher risk missions I've done sometimes have one major ship that then is only escorted by smaller craft that I defeat in short order. The ship attack modes are separated into automatic turrets, manually controlled broadsides (a little like the Assassin's Creed ship combat) and a flak cannon that just sprays wherever. I enjoyed the combat when I got the hang of it, but it becomes way more fun when you buy up cool things like missile turrets.
The exploration is a bit weird. The map itself only really notes the major bases you might visit, and your map starts with a lot of them revealed already (as one might expect for interstellar bases). Getting about the system is fine enough, even a several thousand AM distance is only a minute or so away at warp and it's not too hard to use. The galaxy is filled with distress calls, militia patrols and pirates so it doesn't feel empty in the way some space games can. The commerce is a bit strange, based on a pretty detailed system of buying and selling in order to make money. You can do straight up side missions to get money, but commerce can be less risky in the early game and the right trade can be very rewarding. There's even illegal goods like "space slaves" you can theoretically load up, but I think that requires being in with the pirates. There is a faction allegiance slider, but right now it does nothing for me and I've ended up going with the good guys by default. The commerce pricing guide is useful because it will tell you at the time you're considering buying a commodity (on the same screen) the price of the same item at other stations you've visited and how long ago that information is from. It even notes where things are commonly imported/exported to/from so you can consider regular trade routes that might profit you. It also rewards visiting a variety of stations.
The mining is, to be honest, a little dull. It's your commonplace shoot rocks to get shit. You can buy a mining laser which is better at this than your cannons, but you can just use any old cannon for it. There's also a scanner that's supposed to allow you see weak points, but I've found that the reward on mining is pretty small so the majority of it that I did was all on a mission requiring me to.
Overall, the game is literally Firefly. It even has twangy country music accompaniment to emphasis how much it's trying to be Firefly the game. Now, personally I don't dislike this, as it retains a kind of sense of the day-to-day that Serenity went through in the show. I did, however, disable the aggressive country music for my second play session and was glad of it. I will say that one of the extensive options is to replace the in game music with your own, which is pretty cool.