Rebel Inc: Escalation Reviews

Masterpiece.

good

cool game

Needs more war crimes, 9/10

I killed more civilian then the terrorist did 10/10

Plague Inc but its more skill based bc its RTS

Please tell me you guys have a plan to feature the eastern war in europe as a game, where you have to manage escalation, and can play both as the aggressor and defender, in a head to head multiplayer game maybe too

TL;DR: It's a step up from Ndemic's first title, Plague Inc., but I wouldn't recommend it unless it's on sale. [h3] Positives [/h3] [olist] [*] Terrain matters now, and maps/scenarios are different. [*] Simplified game loop for the better – one new dimension (military) to micromanage, providing some strategy. [*] No more popping the stupid DNA bubble. [/olist] [h3] Negatives [/h3] [olist] [*] The really annoying pop-ups still come up (just less often). [*] Game design is stale (see below). [*] Repeated events that you can't automate away and are just annoyingly stressful. [*] They still haven't fixed a bug which makes it impossible to win (you can't negotiate with the insurgency and the insurgency is now immortal). [/olist] Rebel Inc. shares the same flaws as Plague Inc. It has some severe game design issues, which become painfully obvious when you play on Brutal or Mega Brutal: [list] [*] It's still just Plague Inc. with a coat of paint and some bells and whistles. It still follows probability, resistance, and outcome design. [*] It's still way too formulaic: get this, get that. [*] There's no concrete feedback between stability and civic investment; one initiative can flip everything. [*] The gameplay still feels extremely random rather than strategic. [*] The reputation system is just as annoyingly unfair as the cure system was in Plague Inc. [*] The added anti-cheese mechanics are just stupid. [/list] [h3] Explanation [/h3] 1. Plague Inc. follows the design of three areas you can invest in: - Spread – how easily your disease can spread around the world. - Resistance – how likely it is for humans to find out about the disease and how hard it is to cure. - Outcome – how likely they are to die from the disease. This is pretty much the same in Rebel Inc. but somewhat simplified: Stability is what you're told your initiatives influence, which then trickles down to eliminating hostiles and converting neutrals into supporters. 2. Because it mostly centers around Plague Inc.'s resource and map design, you don't have many options that do fundamentally different things. It feels more like a checkbox experience rather than an actual in-depth experience. For instance, I would love for us to focus on: - Financial victory - Cultural victory - Militaristic victory with each being a stage you can invest in depending on the map and your personal preference for strategizing. Instead, it's all boiled down to a bland stat booster to the very simple mechanics that exist in the game. 3. Due to the very simple nature, it can feel completely random when “supporters” decide to support you. You can bombard them with investments and they MIGHT support you, causing a lot of games to be lost due to this absurdly delayed feedback. 4. A personal pet peeve is that I just don't like a hard resource limiter that punishes strategic thinking. I understand that removing the cure or reputation in both games allows for turtle strategies, but I would counter that at least with Rebel Inc. you could have had so many other avenues to counteract turtle strategies being the go-to approach, whether that be sleeper cells, double agents, or other “enemy from the inside” paranoia mechanics that could topple a beginner relying on turtle strategies. 5. When Rebel Inc. was released, there were a few cheese strategies you could do. Most of them weren't practical cheese. One such cheese was that you could endlessly threaten the rebels (as long as they were still holding territory) and thus gain theoretically endless reputation (it gave you 3 reputation each time you did it, while slightly making the rebels stronger). Now, however, after you threaten them enough, the game will start to magically convert supporters into hostiles at a rapid pace (to a comedic degree), despite the fact that this is only a cheese strat you can do once you've already stabilized the insurgency. At the end of the day, I'm fine with no cheese strats as long as the remedy isn't absurdly tilted in the opposite direction (i.e., not doing the Paradox Interactive approach of game balance). [h3] Conclusion [/h3] In the end, it's a game I play from time to time, but every time I return, it leaves more bitterness than fondness. The same can be said about Plague Inc. to an even greater degree of bitterness, but you can at least excuse it for being mostly a copy of the original Flash game and for being Ndemic's first game. However, given their latest title is coming soon, I'm not holding out any hope for it.

To start, the player gotta read wiki to understand how supporter system works in actual numbers. Some call it a feature, but I feel the dev could do better if it is so essential that a player is forced to losing in spans of minutes. Otherwise stick with casual, and sometimes even that doesn't help. The coalition meta is stupid too. Essentially the game boils down to 1. Keep moving two/three coalition soldiers and contain insurgent. The player lose if the player ran out of coalitions. 2. Divide zones into buffer zones and safe zones. Address safe zone concerns before it was even reported. The player lose if two stabilized zones were not achieved by around ~2007. So the players remain are those who are great at execute single minded meta strategy and could memorize the concerns on each map. Tactic? forget about it. It is just rapid pre-moving coalitions soldiers. Sure, there are RNGs. Guess what though? Coalitions. Economy? Well, with the support pressure so high. Players start to feel numb when they were so deep in debt created by a requirement from previous successes. Different commander? Well. Coalitions. Cheating is fun at least. Those are hardly cheating for the players weren't "experienced" with meta. The player could spend 4 extra cheated soldiers to corner the entire insurgent zone and only get attacked from two zones away by teleporting nether insurgent from portal. So guess what. Back to meta. Yes. Even with cheating, you are trapped in the meta!

This game is actively making me want to become a terrorist by the amount of times I lost to them on this game 10/10 would terrorize people again