This is a fun little game I got from the Humble Monthly Bundle a while back and never tried it out until now. It looked fun but just never had any motivation to try it.
From the store:
Rebel Galaxy is a swashbuckling space adventure, with action-packed combat, exploration, discovery, trade, and “negotiation” with the outlandish denizens at the edge of the known universe.
As the commander of an immensely powerful star destroyer, you’ll battle pirates, explore anomalies, befriend aliens, scavenge battle wreckage, mine asteroids, and discover artifacts. Choose your path as a roguish do-gooder, crafty space-trader or power-hungry privateer – or maybe a little of each! Buy larger and more powerful craft with your hard-earned credits, and outfit them with a variety of wicked weapons and defenses. Set in a galaxy of fantastic sights, and secrets to be found, Rebel Galaxy is above all a space epic of adventure, exploration, and combat.
The edge of the universe is a pretty dangerous place, so watch your back.
As the commander of an immensely powerful star destroyer, you’ll battle pirates, explore anomalies, befriend aliens, scavenge battle wreckage, mine asteroids, and discover artifacts. Choose your path as a roguish do-gooder, crafty space-trader or power-hungry privateer – or maybe a little of each! Buy larger and more powerful craft with your hard-earned credits, and outfit them with a variety of wicked weapons and defenses. Set in a galaxy of fantastic sights, and secrets to be found, Rebel Galaxy is above all a space epic of adventure, exploration, and combat.
The edge of the universe is a pretty dangerous place, so watch your back.
The main focus is combat. Trading can be fairly profitable from what I experienced, mining seems to be a total waste of time but I could just be doing it wrong.
It is important to note that while set in space, it is more like naval combat as the game is actually a 2d plane and you broadside other capitals. There are many ships to choose from and they are all capital class vessels. It can be compared to the game Windward surprisingly closely. It has a fairly large map that is randomly generated each playthrough that is divided into sectors. Each sector is very large with lots of missions and locations to keep you busy for a while.
Difficulty is based on the equipment you have so as far as I know, you can't go buy the best guns and just wreck everything as everything scales up. You can also hire a merc to help you and I highly recommend doing so. They are quite good at distracting some of the heavy hitters and killing annoying fighters. You can directly control a turret by switching to it or you can set them to only attack certain targets.
The soundtrack gives the game a lot of atmosphere, however the music is copyrighted work but you have the option of using custom music if you make a living from Youtube. The art style isn't bad either and goes well with the overall atmosphere the music sets.
It is fun and if you have been subscribed to Humble Monthly (no reason not to be), it was free for you also. My main gripe is the ship computer announcing everything. While not an issue in of itself, the audio ducking is very annoying for me with no way to disable it.
I upgraded to a better ship and have half decent weapons (but im still in the starting sector doing the story mission and making money).