Star Wars: Rebellion

The Good
It's a galactic game of conquest in the Star Wars universe, including all the famous ships, characters, and ground vehicles from the movies and the most popular books. What more can one ask for in a concept? Any game that allows one to assemble a fleet of Star Destroyers to scour the galaxy looking for rebels automatically scores points.

The concept of being able to capture planets through diplomacy and the use of espionage to weaken your opponent's forces is a welcome way of thinking in a universe full of 'brute force' games. The game's two sides lend themselves to two different styles of play. The Imperial forces can assemble a huge military force and just sweep through the galaxy, while the Rebel forces need to initially play a diplomatic game, with guerilla attacks to help them win battles.

The use of characters is also interesting, as characters are sometimes more important than a fleet or planet under one's control. The more powerful characters are trump cards of sort. While one would like to use them for everything, one is also afraid to lose them on an inconsequential mission. The Force-sensitive characters can detect such in other characters and train them, increasing their abilities. Who (aside from Vader, Palpatine, and Luke) are Force-sensitive is random each time, so sometimes this concept plays a major factor. For example, once I had Luke discover that nearly half the rebel characters were Force sensitive and had him train them all. What resulted was a true 'Return of the Jedi' as this band of Jedi dominated the rest of the game, nearly to the point where military conflict was no longer necessary.

The Bad
The interface is quite dreadful. One often needs to go through a number of screens to do the most simple of tasks. Planet reports open up in static, half screen windows and opening two of these will prohibit further such openings until the previous ones are closed. Nothing can be done simply and this is unfortunate, as it is the first major stumbling block in this game being a classic.

The AI is as pitiful as the interface. The computer doesn't play a smart game and often seems just to be roaming around the galaxy randomly, hoping to hurt you wherever it can, despite the side it plays. While initially it will cause a player grief because its haphazard approach causes planet losses in secure territories, once a player knows what he/she needs to do to compensate, victory is usually ensured.

The tactical space combat, while one of the things many looked forward to, actually disappoints. Another poor interface causes the battles to be annoying and confusing and one will often resort to just letting the computer figure out the results. While the idea of watching a fleet of Star Destroyers engage a rag-tag fleet of rebel cruisers with TIE and rebel fighters swarming around should be fun, the way the ships maneuver and place themselves make the battle seem stagnant and boring.

The real time pacing of the strategic portion of the game causes an odd pace, as one will often speed up time to wait for the next major event and find oneself pausing the game to deal with issues. This constant change in pace makes the game feel like a round of stop and go traffic rather than an enjoyable game.

The Bottom Line
An attempt to bring what many people wanted, a galaxy-wide strategy game set in the Star Wars universe, that falls short of being a classic because of bad design decisions. What should have been a fun conflict between an evil Empire and a small band of nobles turns into a fight between the user and the interface.

There are a few Star Wars fans that can overlook many of the games problems. If you haven't tried this yet, then chances are you're not one of those people.

The Good
The Basics: Star Wars: Rebellion is basically a resource-managing strategy game, with real-time 3d combat when the inevitable conflict occurs. You attempt to win through sending characters from the books and movies on missions such as diplomacy, sabotage and abduction, managing resource gathering on a lot of planets, organizing your fleets well and winning the battles.

Interface/Technology

Rebellion uses a Windows-like control system for managing planets. Once you get the hang of it, this works pretty well. There are a few convenience features for when, later on in the game, you'll have a lot of planets to manage, which makes using them easier. A sidebar shows your reports and the bar at the bottom allows you to access things such as the encyclopedia and find specific characters and fleets. It doesn’t take up too much screen space, and I like that.

Things go downhill in the real-time combat. The designers obviously had very little experience with this kind of game device because the mechanics here are poorly done. Moving the camera around is a royal pain and it's far too difficult to issue basic commands to your fleets.

Score: 3/5

The Bad
Graphics

The graphics in the tactical game section are generally decent. Every character has a mug shot which, in reports, is pasted over a different background depending on the mission they're on; there are special pictures for informing you of sabotage, fleet arrival, etc. This is all okay, but the color scheme is far too drab and the images often feel very unprofessional, as if they were slapped together in a very cheap paint program. As far as artistic merit goes, it's all right, but there wasn’t a single image in the whole game that really wowed me.

The handful of cut scenes are fairly high quality and don't suffer from the drab colors the rest of the game does. They're quite good actually.

And like all the rest of the mechanics, it goes sharply downhill in real-time combat. Ship meshes are so low detail that they look blocky at the minimum zoom level, and snubfighters are something like 32x32 bitmap sprites. It's really, really low quality, and not even two huge fleets with full bays of snubfighters colliding manages to look impressive unless you squint (sniffing glue might help, but should not be required to make a game look nice).

Score: 2.5/5

Audio

Sound effects are rare and when you do hear them, only mediocre quality. In real-time combat they're as drab as the colors; I'm not sure if it's low sound quality or just poorly designed effects. Possibly both. Altogether it's quite unremarkable.

The musical score is, surprise, from the movies. It's not context-sensitive or anything as far as I can tell, so basically it's just a few tracks looping in the background. I eventually turned it off. We all love it, sure, but it's overused and there is far too little of it here.

Score: 2.5/5

Single Player Gameplay/Balance

I really like the concept here. You manage fleets and ground troops, handle research of new technology to help the war, control your commandos and use the rare ones with the Recruit ability to find more. There are some neat gimmicks thrown in like finding and training Jedi and assassination missions that only the Empire can perform. The mission system is well done and the most enjoyable part of the whole game.

Resource management is strictly mediocre. You mine ore that refineries transform into resources which are used to make things. It's not supposed to be in-depth and I never found it hard to deal with, but it’s not notable either.

The ships were disappointing; basically, there's an Empire and Rebel version of each one, with slightly tweaked statistics and a different graphic. There is no very unique unit on either side. This is especially annoying because with all the ships they put in, you'd think there'd be some more originality.

Battles ultimately boil down to who can shoot the capital ships up the fastest. There are some advanced tactics options for various styles of attack that, I know from extensive play, are absolutely pointless and only exist to make it look more complicated than it is. Hit points and firepower are really all that matters. There's no navigation, no organization, and no tactics.

Score: 2.5/5

Multiplayer Gameplay/Balance

I never played this game on multiplayer because I never found anyone to play with. I'm not rating this category, but I'm putting it here to let readers know it exists.

The Bottom Line
LucasArts has been going steadily downhill since the great game that was X-Wing. There is no innovation here and it doesn’t even get the tried and true concepts right. This title has little to offer to turn-based strategy games and Star Wars fans and absolutely nothing to anyone else. If you fall into both the previous categories, like me, it might be worth picking up and playing once as both the Empire and the Rebellion. Otherwise, don't waste your time.

Total Value: 2/5

The Good
Star Wars stategic combat? Take control of the Alliance or the Empire? what a concept!

The Bad
The execution of the wonderful concept is the absolute pits.

1. "Rebellion" has the worst interface of any game published in the last ten years. Accomplishing even the most mundane task is a nightmare of right- and left-clicking, none of which is based on any sort of logical menu algorithm. Even if the game was otherwise terrific, the interface alone is enough to make it worthless.

2. The graphics and sound are the pits.

3. The AI is terrible. Ten years ago I might have accepted bad AI, but for a game written in 1997 it's ludicrous. The AI acts in an essentially random fashion.

4. Despite big promises, the game's Star Wars feel is lacking. The personalities are just Strat-o-Matic cards that you assign to uninteresting missions, for which you get text boxes stating whether the mission was successful or not. Most of the really cool characters, like Darth Vader or the Emperor or Princess Leia, are merely used on one "diplomatic" mission after another, which doesn't do anything except slightly raise your influence over a planet.

The entire game doesn't even match the Star Wars universe. The Empire starts out with virtually no military power, which just doesn't make any sense at all, and controls next to no planets; they're pretty much equal to the Rebels, which of course pretty much blows the whole "scrappy rebels vs. huge, lumbering Empire" thing right out the door. My idea of the perfect Star Wars strategy game would have the Rebel player forced the hit and run and disrupt the Empire from all corners, slowly breakign it down, while the Imperial player would have to use sheer force to try to box the Rebel player in until he had nowhere to run. Most planets are unexplored, which makes no sense in a Star Wars setting. At the beginning of the game the Empire exerts no control over the galaxy. What the heck are they an Empire OF? What are the Rebels rebelling against?

The truth is that the game HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STAR WARS. The strategic and tactical elements of the game are no more relevant to "Star Wars" than they are to Fried Green Tomatoes. The game is merely a very, very bad abstract strategic game on which they've plastered the "Star Wars" name and put some of the character's names on the playing cards. Big whoop.

The game's tactical combat system sucks as well; the graphics are poor and the combat is uncontrollable and boring. Other types of missions have no combat at all and there's no ground combat, so you can't order General Veers to begin his attack, and what fun is that?

The Bottom Line
This game is a complete ripoff, an attempt to use the Star Wars name to sucker gamers into buying a terrible, boring and buggy game. Don't buy this game; don't take it if someone PAYS you to play it.