Rebel Galaxy Is Free On Epic, Again

Monday, Fran left Twitter and stepped down from the ABK Women’s Network, a new South Park game is on its way, and Skater XL is going online. Microsoft has another showcase during Gamescom, and there are four classics free on GOG right now. Wednesday, PUGB: Battlegrounds is currently doing a free-to-play week, a Pokémon-like will release later this year, and Lightyear Frontier is a mech-based farming simulator (Clarkson’s Farm?). Thursday, an investor called Activision-Blizzard response “inadequate,” and Nintendo did an indie showcase a million times better than Microsoft did this week.

I never explain why I rundown the news every week: This is the last article to do every week, so it is perfect for a rundown. Anyway, on to the free game on the Epic Games Store for this week: It is a redux of what we’ve already done before. Rebel Galaxy is a space trading simulator done through the spyglass of the USS Enterprise a couple of feet behind you. Yes, I know, you might love Elite Dangerous for being first-person and so precise, that’s fine. Rebel Galaxy is more of a fun and arcade-like space trading simulator, considerably more whimsical in respect to the serious space trucker of its counterparts.

While the aforementioned Elite Dangerous focuses on scale and fully embedding you into the simulator-thing, it does get pretty complicated in a very short amount of time. You might have, at a rough guess, 128 keys in front of you at your PC, and that’s not enough. For Rebel Galaxy, that’s more than enough, and it will tell you so by everything being mapped to the left-hand side of the keyboard (and not putting it in settings). It also reduces the number of ways to go by a whole dimension. Yes, the game is rendered in 3D, but everything you do is on a horizontal plane of an axis, meaning everything you shoot at or fly around surrounds you. That’s the long way of saying that you can’t fly up and down, but you can from side to side (like a rollercoaster).

If you are a fan of trucking and space-trucking to be accurate, then I’d suggest playing a bit of Rebel Galaxy. It does have a few good ideas despite having issues with how limited it feels. The only major thing I’ve found with it is the lack of excitement some might find with it. It is not Star Wars, and you can’t Star Trek your way across the galaxy. You are a trader with a small ship taking jobs and working your way up the ladder, creating a bigger and more dangerous ship to defend yourself and possibly become a pirate. Either you stay in line, trading supplies and doing mining missions, or you grow old and jaded enough to want more than a couple of hundred credits.

The stock market is lacking, which is understandable given the size of the developer behind the game, but from it, you can trade in whatever is on offer. Much like Elite, you can also trade in illegal items such as organs and other black market trade. Your end goal is to just keep going, though there is a story which feeds into your idea of growth. Generally, I think your focus is better on growing yourself and just doing that whenever you feel like it. The sequel focuses more on the mercenary in a space-western, and that fits with the tone of: Do you stick to mining and low-level trading, or turn to robbing people and peddling illegal commodities?

All this week, you can pick up Rebel Galaxy on the Epic Games Store, ending on the morning of the 19th of August. This brings us to next week, and what I’ll be moaning about then: Void Bastards and Yooka-Laylee. The former I reviewed a while back on PS4, with it later coming to Prime Gaming for a bit. If you’re following that series also, you should have it. The latter is something that also appeared as part of the Amazon-based subscription service, and it is something I did not enjoy. Next week should be fun, as I moan about two games I should (by all rights) enjoy but not, and still tell you to pick it up. I guess I am just complicated like that.