February | 2024

Archive for February, 2024

I finished Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

2024/02/20 in gaming

This game was a lot of fun for what it was. Probably the closest to Freelancer since Freelancer, if I may say so (to my knowledge, of course). All the ships handle really well and it’s fun to play. The main character is a woman who looks eerily reminiscent of Jan-Michael Vincent and the game has radio stations and a soundtrack like GTA games. That was clearly a really good choice and helped the game a lot.

The story was really weird and seemed to end at a point, that could have been a chapter 1. Little to nothing was resolved and calling it open ended is still putting it mildly. There are even some minor choices, but some of them don’t seem to have any effect on the game. I read somewhere, they were tracked in case DLC would be made at some point (no such DLC was made).

What ended up being more exciting/interesting than the official main story, was buying a run down space station and building it up again. It even ends up offering ship types, that aren’t available anywhere else in the game. Clearly this should have been the main event and the game should have been build around that idea.

After finishing the story and finishing the space station, I stopped playing the game – random missions are generated at stations in perpetuity, but they’ll only lead to the same combat I had experienced dozens of times already and things have to end somewhere.

It’s always hard to say from the outside, but it does feel as if this might have become a major classic in this genre, if they would have had the budget for it. The gameplay loop is really solid, flying the ships is great. Rockets hitting you is extreme, everything shakes, the glass (?) of the cockpit can have cracks and the player character will sometimes move her hands around (panic, shock etc.), as one might when the ship might be close to blowing up – another really good idea. There is distortion and everything looks really good. All the sounds are solid. Again, there’s really not much missing that could have made it an unforgettable cult classic. A lot of it is already here. I’m really glad I played this, they don’t make that kind of game anymore. I mean, not in great numbers anyway.

Oh yeah, Sharky never became a buddy of mine, so I didn’t get that achievement. I actually looked that one up and she should have been available, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t at her home base nor anywhere else. Super weird. Just mentioning this because I wasted some time trying to find her, when it was apparently impossible to do so.

Also, the ship that’s somehow presented as the best one in the game, really isn’t IMHO (it should speak volumes that it’s the very ship she’s already flying, when she’s crashing in the intro – so why should anyone be so eager to get back to that specific model?!?). The most expensive ship has a “light” hull and that means you pretty much blow up the second the shields are down – and that is going to happen since many fights are relatively long (some are almost like fights of attrition), because pirates have ample reinforcements incoming all the time, the ability to last throughout long encounters is imperative. Even just flying to a mission has hostile ships lying in wait again and again.

It’s possible to mount the most guns on that ship, but what good does that, if the ship can’t take any hits? I usually flew the freighter with he heavy hull and it even allows 4 gun turrets. Even if one prefers to fly a fast(er) fighter, the Foxbat is still a better choice, because the hull for that one is at least still “medium”. Makes all the difference. Otherwise one will be thrown back to the last checkpoint a lot. The game autosaves at certain points and that’s it. Nothing manual.

Finally, everyone should at least check out the intro. It definitely made me play this.