YMMV / Rebel Galaxy

• Awesome Music: The assortment of Hard Rock/Country music is absolutely fitting for the "Space Trucker" aesthetic of the game.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Despite the several varieties of turrets and weapons, there's very little reason to switch from basic Proton Cannon broadsides and Pulse Turrets. They are quite high and reliable damage with a high rate of fire, and the theoretical drawbacks of these weapons (comparatively slow travel time allowing opportunity for fighters to dodge) is mitigated by the fact that most enemies don't attempt to dodge or only dodge at very long range. Simply upgrading your ship chassis and filling it with current level Pulse Turrets and 1-2 mining lasers is more than enough to beat the game with zero difficulty, so there's very little incentive to experiment with different loadouts.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Tachyon Cannons initially seem weak for a broadside weapon, being the weakest per shot of all the different types, and having the shortest range. But, the rapid charging and reload time make it utterly devastating up close. While you often risk being pelted by enemy broadsides, a viable and shockingly effective strategy is to just sidle up next to an enemy cruiser, and mashing your primary fire button to unleash a wicked barrage of damage. Even ships a couple classes above you won't last long, and if you can avoid their cannons, all the better. A viable strategy is to simply hug an enemy ship's blind spot (usually the engines), forcing them to keep turning slowly to try and shoot you with their broadsides, then just spam yours where they have very little means of defense or offense.
  • Even better than Tachyon Cannons are the rare Neutron Beams. Their above-average damage and range already make them among the best picks for your broadside batteries, but what truly lifts them above their peers is the fact they're hitscan, which makes them lethal against targets the other broadside weapons can't reliably hit, like fighters, bombers and fast gunships. Once you get your hands on a decent set of Neutron Beams, you'll never switch them out again.
  • MK1 Pulse turrets are the best choice at low levels. Great range, DPS, low cost (just 5500) and you don't need to purchase ammo. Stick the side of a capital ship and watch its health bar disappear in seconds. Its only weakness is that it's not very effective at shooting down missiles.
  • Surprisingly enough, mining lasers are also ridiculously strong early on. They have shorter ranges than particle beams but they deal full damage to both shields and hull and have a really good DPS rate, and unlike most turrets are a hitscan weapon that's pretty much guaranteed to hit its target as long as it's in range. Stick five or more of them onto your ship and you can fly into swarms of fighters/bombers and shred them to bits in seconds. Not only that, they can literally tear apart capital ships with focused fire, and since they are turret mounted, they can do so while you stick to the rear of the enemy to avoid their broadsides. The MK2 version in particular in the first system is something of a Disk One Nuke.
  • Saving up credits and sneaking through high or extreme danger systems can allow you to buy shields or weapons that are significantly more powerful than what you'd normally have at that point in the game. Broadsides that are two or three levels higher can allow you to effortlessly kill enemy capital ships, and shields of the same level will allow you to casually wade into enemy groups that would formerly have shredded you.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Escort missions. Already problematic in most games that have them, special mention goes to several issues specific to Rebel Galaxy's implementation:
    • Once you get to your client, you must begin the escort by initiating "pair warp" with them. This completely removes control of your vessel, leaving you naught to do but watch as your ships automatically try to slowly navigate away from any large masses nearby preventing you from warping. At least collision damage is mercifully turned off at this stage... unless you happen to decide to cancel pair warp just before you hit something...
    • You still do not have control over the vessels during the warp. This means that you can't try to steer around any asteroid or junk fields in the way, which will kick you out of warp and get you back to the first point of this list. Rarely, you may even drop out of warp too close to a planet or the sun to avoid crashing into it...
    • You will probably run into at least one hostile fleet in the way (at least one spawns for that purpose, and you may run into more fleets that just happen to be there, with no way to avoid them due to the previous point). As per the standard complaint of escort missions, your client would often Leeroy Jenkins themselves to the middle of the fleet before you can protect them (when, in other situations, it's normally quite possible to avoid tough fights simply by boosting far enough away from the enemies)
    • If your client survives the fight but is damaged, you have no way to let them heal or repair. If your ship is badly damaged and you think of making a quick stop at a nearby station to repair... the mission automatically fails if you warp too far away from your client!
    • The faction of the spawned enemy ships is random. If you're trying to gain ranks in, say, the Merchant's Guild, and your client's enemy happens to be them, you'd have to either abandon the mission or be set back quite significantly...
    • All this while you are not told where the destination is; at best you can guess based on the direction you were heading on the map.
    • At least they do tend to pay more in both credits and reputation than missions of similar difficulty, but it's up to you whether it's worth all this trouble...

---