Rebel Galaxy - Freelancer Reborn

Simply put, I love the game. In essence for me it's Freelancer reborn, except with capital ships.

The gameplay is fantastic, although I would strongly recommend a controller. Both the 360 one, and the Steam Controller work brilliantly with the game.

One thing that separates the game from freelancer is the capital ships, and that you use Broadsides for your primary weapons. As such you need to get your sides facing the enemies. Fear not though, it's still super intense, and you have plenty of other weaponry. Ranging from Secondary fire ones such as EMP Waves, Flak cannons and plenty of turrets.

Turrets are mostly A.I controlled, although you can set priorities for each and every one of them. Such as Fire at Any Craft, Target, Locked Targets only, or even Fighters only.

This means that you can focus all fire on a single enemy, or you can handle the capital ships while your turrets deal with the swarms of enemy fighter and gunships.

It's rather odd at first, but after a while it becomes extremely satisfying. To the point of almost feeling like you're in Battlestar Galactica fending off literal swarms of enemies.

Sadly, you're unable to be a carrier and have your own fighters, although it's not too much of an issue.

The story is very interesting, and it certainly is engaging. Although some story missions have very high requirements and as such you Have to go do other missions to get a better ship and equipment.

This is no issue at all, and extremely fun. You can do a variety of missions, or you can just do pirate bounty hunting. Doing missions however increases or decreases your reputation with various factions. This in turn unlocking newer ship hulls, and equipment.

You're also able to join some guilds, such as the Mercenaries or Merchants which give extra missions and other unique ship hulls.

I would strongly encourage you to find one you like.

Trading is not the most complex of systems, but very manageable, and slightly fun. I've never been much of a trader but each system and station has various prices and requirements. An impoverished station will pay a lot more for food and water than a well set up military one. While some might accept some contraband pirate items; ranging from Narco Cola, to Living Organs.

Ships can also be scanned so be careful carrying contraband, the Militia will scan you and will hail you to explain yourself. If you simply ignore their Hails they will go hostile and attack you.

If you want to play with those items, make sure to get a Smuggler's Cargohold; They can't be scanned ;)

Graphics and performance wise the game does extremely well. It's no Star Citizen, but it looks great and runs even better. Now I might have an overkill machine with Two GTX 980Ti's, but playing at 4K with DSR I was topping out at 144FPS which is my monitor's cap, and at worst getting 80fps.

The only slight complaint I have is little lag spikes when phasing in and out of a station. Although this is most likely an engine issue that'll soon be fixed for textures loading in and out.

As for graphical options the game as plenty and they're all adjusted with through the game launcher. It also has 3 graphics APIs to choose from. DirectX 9, DirectX 11 and even OpenGL if you fancy using that.

I unfortunately only have experience running the game in DX11, but it's done exceptionally well.

The last thing I want to mention is the brilliant soundtrack. It's very similar to Borderlands, and I feel it suits the game very well. Personally it gives me a Borderlands and Cowboy Bebop feel to the game and I really enjoy having it on.

In the game launcher however you can also create some custom music options so you can expand it all if you so desire.

All in all, I simply love the game. I've 40 hours into it, and I've still not finished the main story because I've been having so much fun with everything else. If you enjoyed Freelancer, I would really recommend the game; and for others it's simply a great mini sandbox open Space Action Sim with capital ships.