Star Wars: Rebellion

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.

The Good
I tried this game because it had the title "Star Wars", although from the beginning a knew it had bad reviews. I admit that the first 3 times I tried, I could not cope with it and I quit. When the Star Wars virus stroke me again, I gave it a second chance and I was glued for hours!! Yes, the game is really hard, I haven't managed to do anything of notice no matter how many hours I tried but it challenged me... I WANT to beat it!

If you don't stuck on the bad things, you will love this game. It has no action but it's rich and deep. Characters, ships, fleets, missions, spies, technologies and evolution. The game really evolves in your hands and your empire becomes your own personal creation.

There is also plentiful information in the little embedded encyclopedia, about everything in the game, that will boost up your knowledge on Star Wars.

Many say that this is 'a card game with the name Star Wars on it to attract fans'. Maybe, I don't agree, but there is even Star Wars Monopoly. If you don't have a problem to play it, what's wrong with Rebellion?

Also, it's not really important, but I liked the cutscenes :)

The Bad
Yes, I know players dislike many elements of this game, so did I, but I want to justify some of them.

• The nature of the game itself isn't promising for graphics, sound and action. You can't accuse for example a platform arcade game for having poor dialogues. I agree however that (although it doen't affect much) the 'cards' could be drawn better

• Everyone says that the controls are hard and confusing. I am not going to say the opposite, but it can be mastered.

• I didn't like some inconsistencies to the Star Wars timeline. For example you are going to 'discover' and recruit characters that were in the Rebellion from the first movie! also, this is the same for the planets. I had to 'discover' Tatooine!

• Yes, COULD have some action and battles, even poorly done. Even the ancient Centurion had elementary battles.
  
  The Bottom Line
  I can tell that this game was maybe hastily done. It could be simpler, had better graphics, and maybe battles. But if you give it a second chance, and don't define 'strategy' as 'action RTS', and then try to find what is really good of it (believe me, there is), then Rebellion is worth the try!

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