Rebel Galaxy Outlaw

Genre: Space Combat Game / Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

The follow-up to 2015’s Rebel Galaxy, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is similarly a Space Combat Game with Simulation elements, with this prequel released in 2019 on PC and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game puts players in the role of Juno Markev, a space pilot on the trail of the man who killed her husband, but finding herself licking her wounds and scraping her way back after her latest encounter with the man left her shipwrecked and begging for help from an old friend.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is probably a halfway point between games like Everspace, and games like Starfield and No Man’s Sky – It is nowhere near as elaborate and deep as those later titles, and is far more focused on traversal and combat within your spacecraft than the often terrestrial adventures of those games, but unlike Everspace this is a game that is more open-ended, and with more robust Simulation elements. You won’t be building your own planetary colony or making much in the way of story-driven dialogue choices in Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, but there’s far more to do here than point your ship at the closest enemy and shoot them.

While out in the wide universe, you can take off in any direction, but will generally find it’s generally practical to fast-travel to your heading (what with the vast distances in space and all), with the fame interrupting you mid-journey if something comes up, such as a nearby distress signal. Players have a few options when engaging with the environment and other ships in this form, such as scanning the nearby area to detect points of interest or locate hostiles, using a tractor attachment to bring aboard salvage, communicating with other ships via radio, and so on.

When in combat, players can maneuver and target enemies in full three-dimensional movement, and players can even use the ZL button to automatically follow an enemy as it zips around to evade you, though even when using this feature you can still aim your ship to try to better orient yourself and lead the enemy to catch them in your weapons fire.

When nearing a friendly or neutral space station or planetary base, you’ll be docked automatically (along with a small fee and a brief cinematic that you’ll quickly get in the habit of skipping). Once docked, all of your options are all menu-based, but you’ll have a few at your disposal, depending on the facilities where you’re docked. You can repair and purchase upgrades for your ship, or buy an entirely new ship. You can buy and sell commodities, provided you have space in your ship’s hull to carry your purchase. You can head to the local digital bounty board to accept missions ranging from supply runs to investigating debris fields to fighting pirates. You can join various guilds with their own tasks to take on. And you can visit the local bar to hear gossip or partake in minigames like pool or poker dice.

There’s plenty of different gameplay systems at work here that make for a variety of ways to play the game. You could of course hunt down pirates and play the game as a pure shooty Action game, but you could also focus on searching debris for treasure to sell, or keep an eye on which locales are placing a high price on a commodity, buying up your local stock of that commodity and bringing it over to sell for a profit. The freedom of how to approach Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is one of its better qualities.

However, I would be remiss not to mention its flaws as well. The game’s menus are often unclear, and you’ll likely have to spend some time acquainting yourself with them. Also, the game could really use a much wider range of ships and upgrade options – what’s here doesn’t feel like nearly enough. Furthermore, the combat in this game has some nasty difficulty spikes even early on, meaning that players looking to focus on action may have to resolve to spend some time first partaking in mundane errands to earn enough money to upgrade their beater starting ship into something more respectable before doing anything even remotely risky. Also, like other console versions of the game, the Nintendo Switch release lacks a few features that were in the PC version, such as the in-depth ship customization.

Then of course there’s the presentation, and naturally the Nintendo Switch version of the game suffers somewhat here, though not as much as you may fear. The framerates are mostly pretty good (though they can drop when explosions start to go off), but the overall resolution leaves something to be desired. Plus, when you’re in a port, the character models for the protagonist and other people she speaks with can be pretty ugly.

At the very least, the game’s good voice acting is left intact, though the story itself doesn’t seem like anything special. Plus, the game retains the hours upon hours of in-game radio to listen to, separated into multiple radio stations, much as we’ve seen in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. And when this music isn’t playing, the game defaults to a twangy acoustic guitar to underline the “space Western” theme this game has.

Overall, I think Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is an excellent Space Combat Game and Simulation, though it certainly has its rough spots, and the Nintendo Switch version of the game in particular had to make some major compromises in the visuals to get the game to run on the platform. However, players looking for a spacefaring adventure with some good action, and a fair amount of freedom in how to play, this is still a fantastic choice.

tl;dr – Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is a Space Combat Game with strong Simulation elements that has players fighting enemies and taking on oddjobs in a space Western-themed galaxy. There’s a good variety of things to do here leading to a good feeling of player freedom, and though this game has numerous rough edges such as large and early difficulty spikes and a reduced resolution on Nintendo Switch, this is still overall a great game for anyone looking to fly around in a rough frontier in space.

Grade: B+

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