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[Niveras]

From my knowledge, these games are rather heavy on realistic portrayal of space, factions and so on. It's nice to have a game that's more showy with bright colours, large explosions and an exaggerated feel to things. Accurate simulations are fun and all but you need the more light hearted games to provide a good contrast.

Yeah. I'd actually like to see what's basically a Diablo or Skyrim in Space. More or less 3D open space, powerful player ship with unique abilities for use in combat (works better 2D than 3D), ridiculous oodles of lootwhoring/gear drops, but most importantly: claustrophobic areas that basically act like dungeons that you can explore and get rewards from. These dungeons would be Descent-like levels; but this doesn't work quite well with an isometric perspective and combat-as-skillbutton-mashing.

Make the setting some kind of weird half-tech/half-"it's not magic but it is" like Sacred, or just a ridiculous variety of space-inhabiting semi-intelligent aliens, to act as monsters to populate the "dungeons." Don't explain how they are able to persist in space, they're just a fact of life in the setting.

[Gabeux]

Elite Dangerous is perhaps the highlight, while Star Citizen development slowly chugs along.

Elite Dangerous is the highlight of what a game shouldn't do to itself. Probably one of the most expensive games I ever bought and one that pisses me off the most.
Because hey, meaningless grinding is fun! And that's what space games are all about!

That's not what I meant. I meant... Well, I guess I was thinking about how wondrous its flight mechanics are. Handling the ship itself is really immersive and well done. But it's true the game mutilated itself to be an insufferably grindgy MMO even in singleplayer. It's got some depth, but zero variation as far as profitable endeavours are concerned (i.e. trade or die from a grind attack trying to make progress actually doing the not-mindcrushingly-boring stuff).

Well, further proof that we need proper, deep space sims, and that there's no saturation which would better call for lighter games.

Oh I know. I was going to edit what I said because it probably sounded that I was angry at you AND at the game, but I expressed myself poorly. Sorry 

I agree completely on the mechanics and handling. I always say its the most satisfying experience - it looks good and it performs good.
But after 10 minutes, you start asking what else is there. And well..there's not much. So we share the same feeling.

I think light games are cool, as long as they are well made. I haven't played Rebel Galaxy yet (but given that other dorfs like it, there's a high probability I'll like it too), but I'll provide an unnecessary example of what I think is a unnecessary light game:
I bought and played that Cosmonautica game before release and I saw no point in it - even though people told me "It's a cool trading game that you can play only with the mouse".
Well, that's nice there's people who look forward to that. I love space games, the more the merrier, but I personally didn't see the point. Great presentation/art/music/customization, but annoying writing that seems to think the player is a 10 year old, completely static and stupid trading and universe (which was supposed to be the strong part of the game), and terrible combat (you'd think that would be impossible to achieve).
I wrote one of the few negative steam reviews before release warning it was shallow and needed improvement..the devs replied saying (in short) "hey, people like it"...and after release it got a lot of negative reviews (dropping from Very Positive to Neutral quickly).
I guess lot of people and some devs forget that hey, it's freaking easy to get the early adopters to love your game. They are early adopters after all!
(Which is why I think the Space Game [sim or not] genre has the worst and most heated discussions - everyone is an early adopter, and as early adopters we defend what we like even if it doesn't make any sense - but that's another subject.)

That's definitely a kind of light game I don't see the point. I, personally, consider Sid Meier's Pirates! a light game, but one of the best (if not THE best) I've ever played. I dumped hours into it when I was a kid until I did a perfect run, and goddamn did it feel good.
FTL too.

Of course, all of what I say above is highly unnecessary. I don't have great expectations for RG but I'd love to see some well made light games.
I also want to see a new X game. But I guess that boat has already exploded violently and left me crying in the cockpit of some stupid ship named after a smelly animal flying around DeVries with a bunch of broken traders, a Sun bigger than my screen and hidden Xenon and Split space stations in the middle of "smoke clouds" that are supposed to be nebulas with added FPS bomb functionality that will make you miss that time when President's End got rekt by purple spinning ships that kidnap human scientists for no reason other than trolling the protagonist.

Sorry for the double derail, folks. 4h of sleep mess with my sanity.

[IWishIWereSarah]

Rebel Galaxy is in a weird spot :

It feels a bit like Freelancer, with its simple side ("low" number of factions, resources, weapon types, controllable ships when you compare to a X* ). It is a good thing as far as I am concerned.
But it may end up a bit too repetitive. I've only played 2 hours and I've noticed the music repeating itself. I like this music (and that's why I noticed it repeated), as most Firefly fans will, but in a game where you're likely to play in sessions of a few hours, you should have more than 1h of OST :/

[BigD145]

It's $17 in a $60 market. What's wrong with the price?

The indie market is not a $60 market, and I'm not sure there's sufficient content to warrant $17.99.

You're right, the indie market bumps right up against $90 fairly often, as long as you count the smallish dev crowd funded projects. Rarely they go up to the thousands. Now if you're only looking at the $1 market, that's different. Those are usually mobile games. Many indie's are $20-30 upon release, which puts Rebel under or on par with those.

[Greenbane]

You're right, the indie market bumps right up against $90 fairly often, as long as you count the smallish dev crowd funded projects. Rarely they go up to the thousands. Now if you're only looking at the $1 market, that's different. Those are usually mobile games. Many indie's are $20-30 upon release, which puts Rebel under or on par with those.

You're not being very persuasive with those wild hyperboles. The post above yours sounds more convincing.

My rule of thumb in general, indie or not, is 1 dollar per hour of entertainment. So I'd expect to get 18 hours from this one, but I'm reading about people saying repetitiveness begins to set in well before the 10-hour mark. Therefore, I'm on the fence.

[etgfrog]

Well, I ended up playing it for 23 hours before I got bored with it, but that was mainly because I finished the story and there wasn't much else to do after that, besides doing more of the missions that I've already been doing. I guess it would depend on your tolerance for grinding. I only had to slightly push myself to get the largest ship which made the final mission almost a joke. It does concern me a bit that this is almost in the same vein as interstellaria, where it was go from start to finish of the story then that is the end of the water. At the same time maybe its well made because the scope of the development is focused on the start to finish of the story line.

[Greenbane]

This review particularly resonates with my concerns, mainly the repetitiveness and lack of depth and innovation, even if I don't mind the absence of 3D movement and the sea naval nature of combat:

A major, unexpected red flag is that the game is heavily geared towards gamepads. The reviewer straight up suggests avoiding it if you mean to play it with M+KB (which I would).

Is there anything this guy's missing? Otherwise I might opt to wait for a more substantial discount.

[Sirian]

I've tried it using mouse and keyboard and it works fine for me. Someone mentioned the enemy being able to navigate in 3d, but from what I can see that's only true for small ships, other capital ships are locked on the same plane as you.

One annoying thing is that there are hollywood nebulas and asteroid fields everywhere, as well as random pirates pulling you out of warp every 10 seconds. In my mind, space is supposed to be big, like really big, and in this game everything seems crammed together.

Other than that, it plays fine and I'm looking forward to discover more of it. The review from the link above is barely a few hours into the game, so I wouldn't consider it very well informed (he even mistakes a random crate for the mission dead drop he was going after). I think that there might be more depth to the gameplay when you factor in all the different types of weapons, ships and subsystems that you can unlock through various factions, but I'm not there yet.

It certainly doesn't look like it'll be anywhere near close to the scope of a Freelancer, but I think it's a fun little game to play on and off for a week or so.

[BigD145]

You're right, the indie market bumps right up against $90 fairly often, as long as you count the smallish dev crowd funded projects. Rarely they go up to the thousands. Now if you're only looking at the $1 market, that's different. Those are usually mobile games. Many indie's are $20-30 upon release, which puts Rebel under or on par with those.

You're not being very persuasive with those wild hyperboles. The post above yours sounds more convincing.

My rule of thumb in general, indie or not, is 1 dollar per hour of entertainment. So I'd expect to get 18 hours from this one, but I'm reading about people saying repetitiveness begins to set in well before the 10-hour mark. Therefore, I'm on the fence.

Star Citizen sold a 2,500 dollar ship. You can pay $10,000 for a bunch of ships. The basic buy-in is $45 and then you pay a fee. Planetary Annihilation was $90 after its kickstarter. Hyperbole? I wish.

[Hanzoku]

Star Citizen and it's hype-machine is an outlier. I can't think of any other game that sells things at that price and has people slavering to throw their money at it rather then laugh and walk away.

[Greenbane]

Star Citizen sold a 2,500 dollar ship. You can pay $10,000 for a bunch of ships. The basic buy-in is $45 and then you pay a fee. Planetary Annihilation was $90 after its kickstarter. Hyperbole? I wish.

I trust you know Star Citizen's more outlandish packages are the equivalent of backer pledges, and not in any way mandatory to gain access to the full game nor even those expensive ships. The pledge merely provides the player with said ship without working in-game for it, along with lifetime insurance so they can't lose it, as I mean to thank them for the large support. You're willfully prolonging the erroneous implication that Star Citizen sells exclusive ships for huge sums of real money, which is simply not true.

As for Planetary Annihilation, $90 was the Early Access price because backers had to pay that much to gain access to the full game. It's actual, current release price is $40.

So yes, hyperbolic arguments. You imply Star Citizen costs thousands of dollars to get into, that PA costs 90 dollars, and that they're common examples of indie game industry pricing (how else would they be relevant to Rebel Galaxy's price?). In truth, Star Citizen costs $45, Planetary Annihilation $40, and those are fairly rare price tags as far as indie titles go.

And personally, the pricier the game, the more likely I am to seek a discount. I've only very rarely paid full price for $30+ games, especially recently, since 25-30% (pre-)release discounts have become fairly common. So the existence of higher-priced games leaves me unfazed, as I don't really pay those figures. And whatever I pay, I'm always mindful of the ratio I described earlier.

[Gabeux]

Finally got to launch the game, after finishing watching everything Firefly has to offer. Because hey, it's never too late.

My first experience in the game: I'm warping to the first mission, two pirates interrupt me, game tells me to run, my shields go down, all of a sudden a country-rock with vocals starts playing saying "When the devil comes, I'm gonna ride that train."
Hell yeah, I'm in the perfect mood for this.

I like it so far, but the menus, launcher and controls really shows it was made for a console. That's not getting in my way, though.

[Majestic7]

Yeah, I decided to buy this, not for the game itself even, but for the future - I want the designers to make Rebel Galaxy II that is better and bigger version of this.

[Gabeux]

I agree, that's pretty much why I bought it.

The game has that dead universe syndrome in which you are the only guy flying around and docking at stations, everything else is random stuff being spawned (I don't even know if the bounties that the bartenter point for you for money are "real", tracked ships, or if they just spawn when you get the info).
It's pretty bad that a decade ago, there were games that had more "life" (or at least gave you that illusion), even if the game wasn't that great - Flatspace comes to mind.

And as someone else said, the only Firefly similarity is some of the songs and all the pioneer-vibe, pirates and mercs all around.

I think it's worth pointing out that I REALLY disliked Starpoint Gemini 1 for some reason (didn't play the second one though), but I do enjoy this and I have fun flying around getting money and saving meaningless traders and miners.
I expected a fun little game and that's what I got. Some battles can be pretty intense, which makes it cool. And it's always nice to loot ilegally harvested human organs from pirates and then smuggle them right beside the space police.
I'll play it to the end. 

PS: Due to my sleepyness, I probably wasn't totally fair:
The economic model and system events being in place, makes for a 'background alive universe'. One of the random system events might be a trader convoy that, once it reaches a station, will raise the station supplies and drop prices.
But..by flying around, that's not what you see - even if there's ships pretty much every where (rather cramped universe!).
If they were to balance out the "background" life with the "foreground" life, it probably would feel much better already.

[Sonlirain]

The economic model and system events being in place, makes for a 'background alive universe'. One of the random system events might be a trader convoy that, once it reaches a station, will raise the station supplies and drop prices.
But..by flying around, that's not what you see - even if there's ships pretty much every where (rather cramped universe!).
If they were to balance out the "background" life with the "foreground" life, it probably would feel much better already.

To be honest you see ships mostly in tune with the events.  You will often see miners flying to a station experiencing a mining rush for example. And of course intercepting the trade convoy and taking its swag before it unleashes its price wrecking powers on the station its going to is also an option.

In general the universe feels more alive than in Starpoint Gemini 2 (Altho SG2 has a far broader scope) and the economy actually works (unlike SG2 where the entire economy is whack) so if you dump a load of diamonds on a station the price will plummet.

Of course neither come even close to X3:TC AP or even Space Rangers.
The last one especially because the game is squeamish about spawning new ships out of nowhere and opts for simulating everything right down to Governor rivalry.