Star Wars: Rebellion

aka: Guerra nas Estrelas: A Rebelião, Star Wars: Supremacy
Moby ID: 1144
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Description official descriptions

Take command of the Rebels or the Empire in this strategy game from Lucasarts based around the Star Wars universe. Instead of a command and Conquer style game this is based on taking over planets with Diplomacy and also force. Slowly building up your empire and trying to beat your opposing force. There is no actual real-time fighting; it is all done with commands.

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 65% (based on 19 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.2 out of 5 (based on 42 ratings with 13 reviews)

Wow people really hate this game!

The Good
First of all Rebellion was one of the first real time strategy games on the market. Between the concept of the game and the new type of game (rts) Rebellion had the potential to be one of the greatest of all time.

Personally Rebellion was enjoyable and fun. I admit the interface is horrible but after giving it a chance, I got used to it. I think a lot of people who didn't like Rebellion's interface never really gave it a chance. I think many people had this image of C&C Star Wars style, well that's not what it was. Rebellion can be fun and enjoyable but only as long as you cant have too many expectations up front.

I loved building up the empire into the aramada that It should be. I loved it when at the end the Alliance battlecruser is destroyed and the droids run for cover. This is a game I play often and still enjoy today. I liked the tech tree and enjoyed building super ships.

The Bad
Ship combat well.... it sucked. Also what other reviewers said about a card game is true. Players like Luke and Darth are no more than a strato card that can raise planet morale a pinch. The way the game deploys characters is horrible. Also Intelligence was hard and almost useless. It would have been better if they had just done some sort of abstract funding model and said your intellegence depended on how much you spent. (I.E. the more you spent on intellegence gathering, the better you knew the location and strength of your enemy)

 Also lets face it... How can a game call itself Star Wars when the empire starts out even with the Alliance in ships and planets?  <br><br>**The Bottom Line**<br>The game has its flaws.  If you were a die hard Star Wars fan I would probably not recommend it to you.  However if it doesn't bother you to stray a little from the Star Wars universe, then this can be a good game for you.

Trust me, the interface can be mastered, its just a little hard to understand at first.

Windows · by William Shawn McDonie (1131) · 2000

Lacking in too many ways (Revised)

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

Windows · by ShadowShrike (277) · 2004

Who wanted this?

The Good
Combat and diplomacy in the Star Wars Universe was an interesting concept and, basically, I did like the way they dealt with interplanetary relations. Combat on ground and in space was fun, but not fully realized.

The Bad
Rebellion was a trading card game disguised as a computer game. Poor AI, weak graphics, and no distinctive characters hurt this promising game. Even Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are reduced to a stack of numbers. So much of the game happens off screen too. If you send a squad of stormtroopers to blow-up a shield, or tell Commandos to capture an Imperial officer, all you receive is a success/failure window. This game has a terrible interface as well. Every action requires opening a new window! Just try to coordinate a fleet attack in one end of the galaxy and a diplomatic mission on the other. Finally, poor graphics hamper the most interesting part of this game- fleet combat. At last there is a Star Wars game that allows you to send a swarm of A-Wings against a Star Destroyer and it looks like it was rendered on a C-64!

The Bottom Line
LucasArts has constructed a technological terror! Beware a strategy game that combines Dilbertian micromanagment with a Kafkaesque interface!

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2006

[ View all 13 player reviews ]

Trivia

'Star Wars: Rebellion' earned Gamespot.com's nod for 'Most Disappointing Game of the Year' in 1998.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Matthew Bailey.

Additional contributors: Trixter, Entorphane, Apogee IV, chirinea.

Game added March 26, 2000. Last modified January 18, 2024.