Star Wars: Rebellion

Other products by Lucas Arts

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00000K514
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: October 14, 1997
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,789 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

GameSpot Review

Star Wars Rebellion dies the death of a thousand clicks. The promise of a strategy game set in the Star Wars universe had gamers positively quivering with anticipation. Images of Master of Orion with Imperial Walkers, or maybe Red Alert with Stormtroopers, danced through the minds of Star Wars fans and gamers alike. What LucasArts and the developers at CoolHand have given us instead is Spaceward Ho! with an infinitely more confusing interface.

Buried somewhere inside Rebellion (titled Star Wars Supremacy in the UK) is an interesting, albeit familiar, game. There is a tactical space combat mode, some resource management, diplomacy, planetary bombardment, and other common space conquest elements. Unlike games like Spaceward Ho! or Master of Orion, Rebellion runs in semi-real time (it can be paused and speeded up), which simply adds longer periods of waiting for actions to be performed. Darth Vader, Luke, Han, those annoying droids, and the rest of the crew are all on hand to add some character to the proceedings, and the overall visual and aural style is fine. But along the way, things break down, and conquering the galaxy becomes an exercise in tedium.

The premise and approach are boilerplate. There is a vast galaxy of variable sizes (you choose from small, medium, or large), which is composed of sectors that contain numerous planets. The Empire and the Alliance are struggling for control of these planets in order to further the victory requirements: to occupy the headquarters and capture two important enemy functionaries (such as Darth Vadar or Luke Skywalker). The only gameplay option aside from galaxy size is to exclude character capture from the victory requirements, otherwise the goals of every game are the same. Each game is randomized, but that just affects the disposition of resources and planets. The actual pace and format of each game remain consistent.

To fulfill these goals, you build mines and refineries on planets, create fleets, train military units, and set about bringing new planets under your sway by either force or diplomacy. By sending diplomats to neutral planets, you have a chance to bring them to your side without force. If you have enough firepower, you can just go into orbit and bomb them into submission, then send down troops to garrison. This is all abstract: Hit a button and the planet is yours (or not). Realizing that this was boring, the designers grafted a tactical combat interface onto the strategic game. The solution was misguided, to say the least.

Space battles can either be decided instantly or fought in a 3D view with a certain degree of tactical control. Capital ships and fighters can be given maneuver and attack orders, including formation (left and right hooks, the anvil, etc), stand-off attacks, and other commands that only minimally affect the outcome. No matter what orders you give to units in this mode, the battle always seems to be won by the side with more and/or better units. All the moving cameras and 3D ships can't disguise the emptiness of this mode. And, while you can rotate and zoom the view, I could find no command to simply scroll it. There is no substance or nuance to tactical warfare, making it a cumbersome appendage to a game that can little stand such baggage.

The greatest strike against Rebellion is its utterly confusing interface. If the designers had sent out to create a more Byzantine interface, they could not possibly have done any better. It takes multiple clicks to perform the most rudimentary tasks. Want to try to sway a planet to your side? Open the specific sector, use the people finder to look at characters, go through several screens to determine their diplomacy rating, right click on them, select a mission from the drop-down menu, click on the target planet, select the mission type from the pop-up box, and confirm. Want to build a ship? Use the galactic information display to highlight sectors with ports, open that sector, find which planet has the port, click on the manufacturing icon, open the build menu, and select the ship. Your little guide can help with this process a bit, but you still have to find and select the proper place to build, which is equally time-consuming. You also can't default the little bugger - either C3P0 or SD-7 - to shut up, so he rattles on at the beginning of each game played at the easy level.

Complicating matters is a lack of readily available information. Want to know where all your factories are and what they're building? Go find each one. Want to see all the information on a planet? Click separate icons for defenses, manufacturing, and ships in orbit. Where one screen or menu would do the trick, Rebellion has three. Since there is really very little to the game itself beyond build ships/take over planets/repeat as necessary, this hunt-and-peck method of gameplay is what stands in for actual gameplay. Finding information becomes the game.

It's all meticulously explained in a 170-page manual complete with 40 pages of tutorial. I searched the documentation in vain for some shortcuts to some of the most fundamental tasks. When a unit is sent out on a mission, you have to wait for it to return home before you assign it to a new mission. That means recon units fly halfway across the galaxy, do their recon, and return, only to fly right back to the same sector. Worse, the game is buggy and the AI is laughable. I've watched the Empire sit back and do nothing for weeks at a clip. I've had units disappear from the roster. There is stable head-to-head play over LAN and Internet (via the Zone), but it doesn't relieve the tedium of the actual gameplay. And why are there no single missions or scenarios? Or any option to play custom tactical skirmishes?

This is a sloppy game that bears all the hallmarks of being shoved out the door half finished. The same fundamental gameplay can be found in a vastly more entertaining form in both Spaceward Ho! and Stars!. As for giving Master of Orion a run for its money, it's not even in the same league. The strategy genre still lacks a decent Star Wars game, and the sad part is it didn't have to be that way. --T. Liam McDonald
Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

Product Description

Take the galaxy by force. Take the galaxy by diplomacy. Take the galaxy via covert operation. Earn the loyalty or resentment of up to 200 worlds. Rebellion gives you a myriad of means to implement strategy and tactics on a grand scale and in real time environments. With control of the entire Star Wars galaxy as the prize, will the Force be with you? Discover for yourself.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Control the galaxy, but beware the mouse clicks, September 26, 2003

By	Alex Diaz-Granados "fardreaming writer" (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Star Wars: Rebellion has been around for a while, and with the neverending stream of Star Wars games being released by LucasArts, it is surely being relegated to the backwaters of Star Wars gamers' consciousness. Its graphics aren't as gorgeous as Rogue Squadron or any of its sequels, and its style (real time strategy) may not be as popular as either first-person shooters a la "Bounty Hunter" or even "The Phantom Menace."

Yet to some strategy-gamers like Yours Truly, Rebellion (known in the UK as Star Wars: Supremacy) does have its virtues. While it is a strategy game on a galactic scale, it does combine elements of roleplaying (players can send major Star Wars characters from page and film on missions)and space warfare at the tactical level (once a player has built a few fleet units, they can be sent from their territory into enemy systems to invade planets or engage opposing fleets).

Players can choose to play as either the Empire or the Rebel Alliance, choose the level of difficulty, and the amount of planetary systems that will appear in the Galactic Information Display. The tougher the level, the more systems will gravitate to the oppposite side. The object of the game, of course, is to control as much of the Star Wars galaxy as one can, with each side having ultimate victory goals that must be achieved. To be more precise, the Rebels must capture both Darth Vader and the Emperor, while at the same time taking and holding Coruscant.

The Empire's mission is similar but trickier. Not only are Mon Mothma and Luke Skywalker to be in Imperial custody, but Alliance HQ must be destroyed. But unlike Coruscant, the Rebel HQ complex (it looks like Cloud City) can be moved from one Alliance controlled system to another. (Those who find the complete Victory conditions to be too hard at first might choose the HQ-only option.)

Things I like about Rebellion:
1. The "main title" sequence. Most good Star Wars games pay homage to their parent media source (the films) by having the "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...." card and the title crawl setting up the game's storyline. Rebellion is set immediately after Episode IV, so in some ways the game can be used to imagine alternate timelines and different outcomes to those we saw in the movies. Actual cues from the John Williams scores add that touch of genuine Star Wars atmosphere to this starting screen.
2. The use of characters from books and films. Although Rebellion shows its age by incorporating worlds and characters mentioned in books published up to 1998, I like the fact that the game designers did not limit the cast of "agents" to just the canon film characters. Fans of such Expanded Universe characters as Grand Admiral Thrawn, Talon Karrde, Borsk Fey'lya, Labria, and Pellaeon will find them included here. The one limiting factor is that only a few major characters will have audio cues included in their mission reports (and even those get old fast if you play the game in one sitting), so don't expect to hear the famous Thrawn's musings or Chewbacca's growls. I also like the fact that certain characters have strong Diplomacy ratings (Leia, Mon Mothma, Piett, Jerjerrod, and of course Vader and the Emperor) that only get better with each mission, while others are better at Combat and Espionage.
3. The graphics. OK. The game is not new and it's showing its age, but those fleet battles are still pretty cool. They may not be very varied, and at times it's best to just go to the Results screen if you send, say, a Star Destroyer or two against a system defended by one X-Wing squadron....or a Mon Cal cruiser against a single TIE squadron.

What I don't like:

1. It depends too much on mouse clicks. Another reviewer called this game the Death by 1,000 Clicks (or something along those lines). I have gotten used to this, but getting used to something doesn't mean you have to like it.

2. Team building. Supposedly, you can make a team of various characters to accomplish missions...or send out decoys to divert the enemy. While fine in theory, either the program is faulty or I am as dense as a Kowakian monkey-lizard. It did take me several months just to figure out the basic game, even after reading the manual, but geez...I still can't get the Team thing done.
3. Predictability on Easy level. OK. I don't enjoy pain much so I tend to avoid switching levels on PC games, but I have noticed that the Empire never attempts to build a Death Star on Easy level. It DOES drain resources, and maybe when I play as the Rebels I don't give the AI Empire time to gather raw materials for a battle station, but c'mon...to never try?

For an older game, it is not without its bugs -- it does crash from time to time and some of its features do get annoying, but Rebellion is still entertaining and fun to play. What more can one ask of a game designed in the late 1990s for Windows 95/98....except maybe a Prequel edition or a revamped Classic Trilogy/EU version with new graphics?

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rebelion's in the middle of the middle to top., November 21, 1999

By A Customer

the game could have been so much more, I agree. A exucution and interrogation process for prisoners, a ground combat engine, better travel times(almost 100 days from one end of the galaxy to another?), etc. But the 3-D space combat rocks! Much like the upcoming Force Commander. Also, a lot of characters and ships to command. multiplayer is fully supported, and you can chose your difficuty, galaxy size, and play both sides. The empires forces do seem not much larger than the rebels. Also, the idea of force rulling is made impossible by the rebellions on the planets. You get several permanent characters, plus some radomly selected ones too. You can also recruit and send people on missions, like rescues and assasination attempts. Overall, a good game. Try it.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful game...don't believe the naysayers, December 20, 2000

By	Matthew J. Rowland (Lees Summit, MO United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am one of PC Gamer's biggest fans, and there are only a few of their reviews I have ever disagreed with. One of them was Rebellion. Garnering only a 61%, I was immediately skeptical. But after playing it, I realized that this game was one of the most addictive and fun games that I have ever played. People will tell you that the micromanagement will eat you alive. They say you have to "click here and here and here and here and here and here" just to accomplish a simple task of building a ship. Well, sure, you can do that, if you take the long route approach to doing things. And once you get playing, you'll learn all the little shortcuts.

Graphics aren't great, but that's not what makes this game a winner. The gameplay is constant. It is frantic at times. Should you send Han on that sabotage mission or leave him to help lead troops into battle against an Imperial system? And some characters are Force-sensitive, allowing them to be trained by Luke (or Vader or the Emperor) once they reach a certain rank.

I can't list all the great features of this game here because of space. But this is the most addictive game that I have ever played. Star Wars fans will not be disappointed. Strategy fans will not be either. It will not appeal to everyone though, so if you really detest strat games, don't buy it because it won't be your cup o' tea. But despite the steep learning curve, you'll be enjoying it for months on end.