{"id":69977,"date":"2019-09-01T03:09:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-01T10:09:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/game-review-rebel-galaxy-outlaw-is-a-great-space-western-once-you-figure-out-what-youre-doing\/"},"modified":"2019-09-01T03:09:37","modified_gmt":"2019-09-01T10:09:37","slug":"game-review-rebel-galaxy-outlaw-is-a-great-space-western-once-you-figure-out-what-youre-doing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taterboy.com\/blog\/2019\/09\/game-review-rebel-galaxy-outlaw-is-a-great-space-western-once-you-figure-out-what-youre-doing\/","title":{"rendered":"Game review: \u2018Rebel Galaxy Outlaw\u2019 is a great space Western \u2014\u00a0once you figure out what you\u2019re doing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(Rebel Galaxy Outlaw screenshots)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw<\/a><\/em> ($29.99 on the Epic Games Store) is a sprawling, open-ended game of space trading and combat that is aggressively uninterested in teaching you how to play it.<\/p>\n

Most modern video games start with some kind of tutorial that explains their mechanics in excruciating detail, because other developers are worried that you might miss something important.<\/p>\n

Outlaw <\/em>has no such concern. Five minutes into a new game, it drops you off in deep space, equipped with little more than a couple of control tips, and leaves you alone to sink or swim.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in the spirit of the deliberately user-unfriendly PC games of the \u201880s and \u201890s, which wore their impenetrability as a mark of pride. There\u2019s a lot you can criticize about Outlaw\u2019s <\/em>gameplay or mechanics, but if you dig into it, it already addresses most of its own major issues. You just have no obvious way of knowing how.<\/p>\n

In Outlaw<\/em>\u2019s defense, its director Travis Baldree has made his own video tutorials via streaming and YouTube, one of which (below) is linked to Outlaw\u2019s <\/em>page on the Epic Games Store launcher. That, in turn, highlights that Outlaw <\/em>is an expansive, ambitious game, particularly for an indie project, and you can have a lot of fun with it once you know how. You need to do your (space) homework, though, or most of what Outlaw <\/em>has to offer is hidden beneath a waxy layer of unnecessary boredom.<\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Outlaw, <\/em>developed by Double Damage Games<\/a>, is a prequel to the 2015 sleeper hit Rebel Galaxy<\/em>. The \u201cdouble\u201d in Double Damage is Baldree and Erich Schaefer, two of the co-founders of the late Runic Games (Torchlight<\/em>), and who expanded the company to five people to work on Outlaw<\/em>. The team is split between Seattle, San Francisco, and Lewiston, Idaho.<\/p>\n

Double Damage has been working on Outlaw <\/em>for around three years. \u201cWe didn\u2019t start on it right after the last game,\u201d Baldree told me. \u201cAfter Rogue Galaxy<\/em>, I had a good six or eight months of working on the console versions, and recovery and just dealing with stuff. Then we actually prototyped a totally separate game, and it was cool, but somewhere along the way, I thought, okay, I\u2019m not tired of Rebel Galaxy <\/em>anymore. I\u2019m going to prototype something and see if we\u2019re excited about it, and we were.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then Baldree contacted Howard Day<\/a>, an art director whose work he\u2019d followed online for a decade.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s also a big old-school Wing Commander<\/em> fan, like me, and he did all the initial artwork for [Nightdive Studios\u2019<\/a>] System Shock <\/a><\/em>reboot that they Kickstarted<\/a>,\u201d Baldree said. \u201cWhen we brought Howard on, it solidified it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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You play Outlaw<\/em> as Juno Markev (Lani Minella<\/a>), who appeared in the first game as the player character\u2019s elderly aunt. In Outlaw, <\/em>set almost 40 years earlier, she\u2019s middle-aged, married, and trying to leave her smuggling days behind her.<\/p>\n

When her husband ends up dead, Juno comes out of retirement to track down his killer, a pirate nicknamed Ruthless. After their first encounter, shown at the start of the game in an animated sequence made by Titmouse<\/a>, Juno ends up marooned and penniless in the backwater Dodge Sector of the galaxy. She calls an old contact, borrows a battered cargo ship, and starts over from square one.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a big change to have the player actually be a character this time out,\u201d Baldree said. \u201cIt lets us do a lot of stuff we didn\u2019t have the time and resources to do in the previous game. It was easier to write in a lot of ways because there\u2019s a protagonist. You\u2019re a faceless nobody in the last game, which was made in too little time, running down the clock on the bank account. More effort was put into this one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Your primary goal in Outlaw <\/em>is to track down Ruthless for a rematch. You gather intelligence and resources by working odd jobs and doing favors on both sides of the law, as a bodyguard, mercenary, smuggler, cargo pilot, pirate, bounty hunter, and\/or slave trader.<\/p>\n

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The original Rebel Galaxy <\/em>was a naval combat game that happened to be set in space, where you flew a procession of frigates, lining up broadsides and pecking away with automated turrets. In Outlaw<\/em>, you fly smaller, faster spacecraft, and are no longer limited to a single flat horizontal plane. The combat is now straight-up dogfighting, full of missile locks, aerial maneuvers, blaring heavy metal, and all the clashing cinematic sound effects that you shouldn\u2019t actually have because you\u2019re in space.<\/p>\n

In the early game, Outlaw <\/em>is as hard as it\u2019ll ever be. You\u2019re better off avoiding every fight you can for the first few hours, as the starting ship isn\u2019t much more than a shoebox with wings. The combat is built around evasion, response, and quick reactions, none of which are readily possible until you\u2019re actually in a decent spacecraft. Once you can afford a better ride and a few upgrades, so you can actually hope to survive all the cool space battles, Outlaw <\/em>(I refuse to say \u201ctakes off\u201d) improves dramatically.<\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t many games out there, in fact, which are as much of an improvement on their predecessor. The first Rebel Galaxy <\/em>was a rushed project \u2014 \u201cthe last game was just seat-of-the-pants, contracting people to get stuff done as fast as humanly possible,\u201d Baldree said \u2014 and relied heavily on procedurally-generated content. Every person who played Rebel Galaxy <\/em>got a different set of planets and systems, with a high chance of running into random pirate encounters that they had no realistic way of surviving.<\/p>\n

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In Outlaw<\/em>, the game\u2019s universe is now hand-built, with a lot more thought put into its design and aesthetics. There are still random encounters, but they\u2019re scaled now by the system you\u2019re in, so it\u2019s easy to stick to the less dangerous parts of the Dodge Sector until you\u2019ve got a ship that can handle a real fight.<\/p>\n

You can get out of your ship as Juno and check out the interiors of various stations and habitats, each of which have their own persistent sights, maps, markets, and NPCs, and all of which feel more worn down and lived-in right from the start.\u00a0Outlaw\u2019s<\/em> version of deep space is good and grimy, like 1970s science fiction; it\u2019s full of CRT monitors, neon signs, blocky text on black screens, and dark bars full of Jim Henson rubber aliens. When other pilots contact you, it\u2019s on a flickering green monitor like an old closed-circuit TV. Each of the ships you can purchase looks beat-up and scarred, because you\u2019re out on the fringe of explored space and nothing here is new.<\/p>\n

The soundtrack is a particular high point of the overall experience, with more than 24 hours of licensed music split across seven in-game radio stations. I can already tell I\u2019m going to end up with a couple of new favorite bands from playing Outlaw<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve lost more time to than anything else, though, is 8-Ball. For some reason, this space combat\/trading game has a simple but fun pool simulator as a tavern game, alongside slot machines, dice poker, and an arcade machine that is clearly and legally distinct from Asteroids<\/em>. I have blown a lot<\/em> of my repair\/upgrade budget in Outlaw <\/em>on \u201cjust one more game\u201d of 8-Ball, and am genuinely tempted to see how far I can get by pool-sharking across the galaxy.<\/p>\n

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The sticking point, though, is still its lack of player guidance. There are a few little problems other than that, like how the mouse-and-keyboard controls are actually pretty bad, but the lack of any kind of in-game tutorial is easily Rebel Galaxy Outlaw<\/em>\u2018s biggest problem.<\/p>\n

I like Outlaw<\/em>, and it\u2019s a lot <\/em>of game for $30, but it outsourced its own manual to its community. There are entire mechanics and features in Outlaw <\/em>that you might never find on your own, and some of them are crucial to the experience. I\u2019d never have made it out of the first system if I hadn\u2019t read about asteroid mining on a message board, and I only figured out how to throttle back the ship\u2019s engines because I heard someone else complaining about it. I had to consult two different out-of-game sources to figure out the mechanics behind the single best money-making endeavor, in a game where you spend most of your time scrambling for cash.<\/p>\n

You can go on gaming websites right now and see people complaining about how Outlaw<\/em>\u2019s early game degenerates into a boring grind for cash, as you make penny-ante cargo runs to fund your first couple of upgrades. Ordinarily, you could chalk that kind of thing up to user error, but in Outlaw<\/em>, they aren\u2019t exactly wrong<\/em>. They just aren\u2019t used to a modern video game that hides its central mechanics like this.<\/p>\n

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(Rebel Galaxy Outlaw screenshots) Rebel Galaxy Outlaw ($29.99 on the Epic Games Store) is a sprawling, open-ended game of space trading and combat that is aggressively uninterested in teaching you how to play it. Most modern video games start with some kind of tutorial that explains their mechanics in excruciating detail, because other developers are… Read the full article…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":69978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[174,377],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games-media","category-gaming"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t