What is the worst possible mechanic you can think of in a game? I would like to propose the idea of kicking the player out of the game, into the main menu, and then forcing them to reload the game from wherever it last auto-saved. The most frustrating part of any game would be the load times, so forcing you into two just to get back to playing is worse than anything Bloodborne, Dark Souls, or Sekiro has done to me. Yes, being inseminated from the rear by a long pointy thing four times a year is more enjoyable.

What bumbling idiot of an indie developer producing a side-scrolling desaturated vaguely emotional story; and did that? None of them. Though you do die a little less than you do in Limbo. Only a little though.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is the prequel (though the game doesn’t outright tell you) to the strangely engaging but a little boring, Rebel Galaxy. Give em points for naming, I guess. I previously called Double Damage’s first foray into space westerns ‘a nice Firefly-like game,’ from a boring management/dad’s simulator school of gaming. A collection of fetch quests early on that went on and on, but still had some energy in it when it was done. The game also still sends you across the galaxy to give you a good old thrusting now and then.

Outlaw builds on that, going for a more open experience while retaining the fetch quests. There are lots of mini-games on stations, giving them some life. This includes a market that lives and breathes, and the simple idea of upgrading your ship through several methods. Overall the game is good and enjoyable, I kept wanting to play more and more after twenty hours. However, it is here where I must say, the design options are from someone who has never seen an enjoyable game before.

For the first two hours, I had no idea what to do. I had seen an article headline stating “Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is best experienced outside cockpit mode.” Let me tell you, to be two centimeters from my ship’s voluptuous stern trying to peer over it to shoot at whatever was on the other side was a nightmare. If you could change the FOV, or move the camera a little, it may have made it 300 times more enjoyable, however, the options to adjust it are as scarce as a Nun’s little black book.

So after two hours of stumbling about like Peter Sallis in West Yorkshire, I did the sensible thing. I moved inside to where I could see the grimy 1970’s view on space with the FOV of about 2 degrees. This is where I would like to say the UI was never designed for humans, just taken from every 70’s interpretation of space future tech minus the beige panels. However, there are blinky orange lights and green CRT monitors everywhere.

This is where a tutorial wouldn’t go amiss, there might be one, but it’s a whistle-stop tour of “This is a delicate ship made of congealed turds and 70’s era sci-fi, have fun.” Once I’d turned down the generic rock, put on comedy albums or podcasts, picked up a guitar, and created a cramped cockpit in my small office, it was fun. I was simulating the sewage treatment plant out of this simple space trucker. While Elite Dangerous requires a degree to release the docking clamps, C. L. Moore’s Outlaw thinks a simulation of docking is to point your ship towards the station, hurl yourself at it like I do Dark Souls‘ bosses; fade in, fade out, and you’re there.

There’s a lot of this and it makes the world feel much smaller than before in comparison. I want to sit in my space truck with several tons of prohibition pornography and the dead hooker in the back, while I listen to Whitney Cummings talking about sex robots back in the distant 21st century. However, with auto-pilot getting me there in a quarter of the time, a quick fade out and fade in is less annoying. Comparatively, I’d rather move fast enough to make auto-pilot an option rather than a requirement.

I get that there are players out there that want to rush through the game, I am one of them specifically for this review. Nonetheless, traveling 500 odd miles-per-second in the infinite void of space is a bit slow, even if it would give The Flash whiplash. Then there’s the jump drive, allowing you to jump from system to system in this huge map. Sadly with the jump drive and several other star-systems to travel to, it feels smaller as you fade in and out again to deliver Greel Whiskey 12 quadrillion furlongs away.

This takes me to the story, or shall I say my story. As it is open-ended and you can approach it however you want, but it is still linear. For you see, you are on a mission to hunt down a man who has wronged you, you’ve shot them, and are both on the run from and towards each other. It is that standard issue with linear storytelling in an open world, you can walk off for three months and it will still be sitting there waiting for attention in a bar. I don’t feel like there is any reason to bother with hunting the only black man in the game.

How do you hunt him down you ask? Well, I don’t know or care. The story goes as thus: I shoot him in the head, he runs away. I’m given a ship, and then I start my space trucking empire. It’s not all humanoid cats, yelling at Rimmer, and listening to RHLSTP. There are some space minefields you’ve got to clear up and pirates to kill. Meanwhile, the story is sitting off to the side waiting for you constantly, yet never moving along. There’s no sense of time or brevity to my actions.

This momentarily takes me to the side activities. As I said earlier that space stations now have their bars with pool halls, slots, and Asteroids in them. Making this is an easy way to get small increments of money with a crap ship or throw your money out the airlock. I’ve had moments where I’ve bought upgrades, gone into battle, been slapped about a bit, and then I don’t have the money I need from that missions killing pirates to repair and then fight more pirates. I also have to upgrade the ship.

Let me tell you something for free: They don’t like being offered some pornography and a handful of custard creams for repairs. For some reason, they want an actual currency to spend on those bits you need for repairs. Oddly enough, the repairs happen instantly and you don’t have to run off into the pool hall to play a Greel for an hour or so losing more money. That would be a more organic way of putting people in bars and pool games.

As much as I like the pool, and as much I enjoy the idea of mini-games within huge games. It is a little abusable to gain several thousand credits to repair the ship with. There’s a Catch 22 of too much money leads to an easily abused system, and too little means there’s no point. However, there is no point to play anyone other than the most expensive player at the time. None of them have characteristics to incentivize you towards any specific character. They are nameless sharks for a reason.

That idea brings me back to the story, which as you can tell by my disinterest in talking about it, doesn’t do anything for me. I’m not gripped by it, and I know two characters names. Richter, because I hate him; and Juno (Auntie June as I called her), who is your Nathan Fillion in this space trucking western. The only others are the man that gave you the junk heap of a ship, and the man I’m sent to kill for reasons I don’t quite understand.

As for the setting, I don’t know anything about it. There are several sextillion humans (it is a real number look it up), a couple thousand Greel, some robots, and I’ve seen a fistful of whatever the Jabba the Hutt facsimile is. It is a space western, I want several million races all having interspecies sex creating millions of more people to trade with, play pool with, or create space babies of my own. Though as I’ve said, as rare as other species are, black characters are just as scares in this space America.

Why didn’t I bother with the story too much? Well, the story goes from slowly puddling about in easy to handle areas to instant death of massive proportions. While we were provided a tips sheet for how to “min-max,” I’d rather play the game as one normally would. This leads to a lot of grinding, a lot of sitting about waiting in load screens; and finding good missions that gain a lot of money without a lot of risk involved.

These things, mixed with the design choices to kick the player out of the game on death, an inability to replay pool without going through the bar, and an atrocious tutorial will (or have) put off several prospective players. When you get down to it, the game itself isn’t bad though, it is just very boring. Sometimes I want a boring game to turn my brain off and listen to podcasts, or sit and think about something I’m going to say in a review. Somehow I believe some others just want a space dog-fighting game or some space freighting game. Rebel Galaxy Outlaw tries to be both, making each of them a little bland.

In conclusion, I enjoy or damn near love what Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is going for. However, it slightly misses the mark for what one might expect from a game that advertises itself to be large while feeling small instead. When you want to do freight missions, combat can get in the way. If you want to do combat, shipping and a lack of foreboding knowledge can stunt you. I’m sure like another space game I could talk about, some of these issues may be fixed by patches, though I’m reviewing it now and not then. So here we are with a mild opinion on it.

A PC review Copy of Rebel Galaxy Outlaw was provided by Double Damage Games for this review.

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