Given that GOG are handing out Rebel Galaxy as a complimentary bonus for any purchase during their big Summer sale, I figured it was due time I booted up the PS4 version I bought a while back. I wanted to set some distance between it and my No Man's Sky playthrough, and that decision turned out to be a wise one because the two share a lot of similarities. Not in any sort of legally dubious sense, just that the two are firmly entrenched in that "space trader" format established long ago by the likes of Elite. There is a plot, with its own mission chain, but it gets steadily more difficult to complete its missions: that's where the whole "open-universe" aspect of the space trader sim comes to the fore. In order to prepare themselves for the harder core missions, the player can raise money via various means - hunting pirate bounties, mining asteroids for the occasional rare resource, completing courier and patrol missions from space stations, buying low and selling high from the commodity markets - and then use that money to either upgrade their current ship or buy a whole new one with higher upper limits. It's fairly standard space sim stuff, but that model has an evergreen appeal to it that I don't mind indulging in that cycle intermittently.

Where Rebel Galaxy shines is in its combat and in its style. We'll talk about the former first. As the owner of a "capital" ship, the player attacks smaller fighters with an assortment of turrets and takes on other ships in their weight class with broadside cannons, giving the game a hybrid dogfight/battleship feel. The broadsides are generally speaking the most powerful guns on the player's spacecraft, but it's nigh impossible to hit the nimble fighters with them: in addition to their speed, fighters will also safely fly above and below the cannon range of the player's ship. Rebel Galaxy greatly simplifies space travel by sticking the player's craft on a 2D plane in a traditionally 3D environment, which also affords them the opportunity to treat ship-to-ship combat like it was two galleons sailing on the open ocean trading cannon volleys. In fact, this simplification is a big element of Rebel Galaxy's appeal for me, though I imagine the opposite is true for a lot of die-hard fans of this format looking for space trader sims to be ever more complex and customization-ready. It's definitely an "entry-level" game of this genre, something to whet one's whistle while they try to psyche themselves up to try Elite: Dangerous or, heaven forbid, EVE Online. Not to say that the combat's easy or that there aren't a lot of systems in play, just that the game has this welcoming accessibility to it that wants to make what is normally a details-obsessed genre for PC gaming nerds as palatable as possible for all audiences. An example of this is how the game auto-saves after every visit to a space station (after you do all your tradiing and ship-upgrading and collect missions) and then simply reloads it if the player happens to crash and burn: no huge resource loss, no drop in reputation or something else that will take some time to recover, no being forced to do a dangerous corpse run to take back the cargo, just a do-over from the last time the player docked, which they should be doing every 5-10 minutes for repairs, trading, and receiving mission rewards. It's simple, though occasionally annoying if the player gets ambushed by superior forces on the way back from spending half an hour mining an asteroid field, but it works.

Then we have the game's style. Rebel Galaxy sees itself in a fightin', drinkin' universe of hard knocks that has country/rock music playing at every occasion. Despite being a lot of licensed music (one assumes - I don't listen to this genre on the reg), the soundtrack seamlessly fits itself around any occasion in the way most VGM soundtracks do, with certain tracks being played at appropriate venues. Fighting pirates or other scoundrels will be scored to up-tempo hard rock tracks about the devil or being a bad, bad man, while just chillin' in an asteroid field or blasting across the star system for the next objective has music that's a little more dialled back and mood-setting. It all serves a whole "outlaw country", Firefly-type of wildlands setting, taking that whole Star Trek adage of "space being the final frontier" a little too literally. I dig it though. This isn't traditionally the kind of music I listen to, but it absolutely works in a space format, just as much as Cowboy Bebop's mix of blues and funk does, or 2001: A Space Odyssey's use of Strauss's Blue Danube. The game's atmosphere is infectious, even if it's occasionally incongruous to talking with Star Wars aliens and chasing ancient relics to rebuild a sophisticated AI program.

For now, I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. I've reached a new star system, where all the mission rewards are higher and the enemy encounters are more challenging, giving me a lot of work to do to get my ship upgraded to the point where it can be formidable again. The game does the MMO color-based difficulty rating, giving you a "risk assessment" for missions and encounters based on your current craft - everything here is rated "very high risk", so I might be running away a lot until I get the funds together for some upgrades. I think I'll be tapping asteroids and avoiding enemy patrols for a while. My one concern is that this open-world cycle of making money and incremental ship upgrades won't stay fresh for the length of time it takes to complete the game's story - I feel like I spent 8 hours in that first system alone, and there's a whole galaxy out here...

(And yes, before you ask, I typed "Rogue Galaxy" at least five times when writing this week's edition of Indie Game of the Week.)

Rating: 4 out of 5.