I remember this game. I remember glancing at Rebelstar: Tactical Command‘s cover when it was new and instantly thinking “Ugh, no way am I ever picking that up”. The plasticky ’90s music video-ish gun-toting alien monstrosities on the cover ensuring this game was passed over by as many people as possible.
The worst part about that bad first impression is that supremely off-putting art doesn’t represent the style or substance of the game contained on the cart. The gorgeous spritework within is stylish, bright, and clean, and the game is not another shrug of an experience destined to languish in bargain bins: this is portable Rebelstar, lead by the same guy who invented the series in the first place. OK, so maybe this is more like portable classic X-COM really—but that’s OK, because he created that too. Well… more like portable classic X-COM if it was reimagined for a younger handheld audience, if you’re going to insist I’m slightly accurate about it.
These much loved origins are the source of all of this game’s numerous strengths—and every single one of its problems too.
It’s obvious to everyone that sort of time-absorbing game in all its freeform mouse-powered glory wouldn’t suit the GBA at all, which is why a whole bunch of typically X-COM-y things have been cut entirely. There’s no base building, weapon research, UFO detecting, funding, multi-storey buildings, or even permadeath to worry about—the focus here is entirely on working your way through a linear set of isometrically viewed strategy missions using pre-made characters.
In spite of this extreme streamlining the influence of all the related games that came before it remains: there’s still cover to hide behind, strategically placed windows to shoot through (or be shot at from), a pool of points to freely spend per turn, and you’ll still feel deeply grateful when one shot out of a dozen actually hits its mark.
Helping newcomers understand the accumulated quirks of more than 15 years worth of iteration is an overly long series of tutorials lightly disguised as missions and training. I’m all for games taking the time to dish out proper help and hands-on experience backed up by a few dialogue boxes, but Rebelstar takes this to such an extreme you really don’t get to play the fully featured version of the game until mission 12—of 25. Even more puzzling is that after all that extensive micro-tutorialling there’s still a jarring gulf between what you’ve been taught and what you now need to do, the scenario you have to survive not matching the difficulty or strategic tone of everything that came before—it’s hard to shake the feeling the development team suddenly realised they’d used up almost half of their allotted stages already and had to kick things up a notch or five just to squeeze the rest of the game in. I was able to muddle through this unexpected turn thanks to the time I’ve spent playing similar games, but Rebelstar doesn’t naturally lead up to this point on its own, and the following missions show this wobble isn’t a one-off blip as the “real” game warms up either.
Previously any character death instantly failed the mission, but the instant you get into the latter half of Rebelstar they’re treated as merely knocked out—unless the game decides to revert back to the old rule for a mission or two. The pool of teammates you have to choose from can change without warning from one battle to the next, which makes it hard to know what to invest any character’s skill points in: why bother making a dedicated medic or heavy weapon specialist if you’ve got no idea if they’ll be available next mission, regardless of how unscathed they made it through the previous one?
Equipment picked up off enemies, or lost in battle, now carries over (to a certain extent—the manual’s irritatingly vague about this) so I do hope you’ve suddenly decided to diligently collect rifles and grenades from fallen enemies in a way you never had to before, because if you haven’t you’ll be in trouble with no way to recover. It can be difficult to know who to equip with what anyway, as the pre-mission menus will allow you to spend as long as you like loading a squad of eight with all the ammo and armour you’ve got, forgetting to tell you until it’s time to place them on the map that you can only deploy six of them—something that would have been not just convenient to know beforehand but tactically relevant. Nobody can be expected to understand or excel at a game that keeps changing its own core rules without any forewarning, or fuzzily spreads out crumbs of vital info.
The manual—at least the PAL version I’ve got here—doesn’t do a great job of picking up the slack. I was hoping this would cover all the gaps in the in-game assistance, giving detailed rundowns of weapon and building types (some walls crumble to grenades and heavy fire, but there’s no way of telling which is which without trying it out), as well as exactly what classes as a cover-providing object and what’s just decoration. Instead I’m faced with page after page of nothing in particular. Is there any difference between a standard medikit and an Arelian one, other than a slight difference in weight? I may never know: the game doesn’t tell me and the instruction booklet doesn’t even acknowledge their existence.
The story accompanying the action is if anything even more unhelpful, to the point where the dialogue directly contradicts the mission objectives in a few places. In one case the characters decided they should hunker down in some ruins and try to hold off a pursuing mob of aliens. So I obediently did exactly what they were talking about, because why wouldn’t I? It was only after spending far too long making no progress I went and checked the actual mission objectives, which read: “All Rebel characters must survive. All Rebel characters must exit the map.”. It turns out all I actually needed to do was walk everyone over to the exit arrows at the opposite end of the map—I not only could have, but should have, ignored every word coming out of the cast’s mouths.
It’s an irritating pitfall the plot falls into far too often. Telepathic dream-warnings of tomorrow’s sortie going awry and a commander ordering you to evacuate immediately because there are just too many enemies flooding into the area should be the dramatic twist in a tough fight for survival, but what this actually means is two enemies turn up, identical to every other I’ve spent this early mission shooting down with ease. It’s a story that seems to have forgotten that everyone always survives every battle, that you’ll never get to fight through the scenario the story is pushing you to believe is happening—that this isn’t X-COM. What’s here instead is a muddled experience trying to be a breezy “young adult” take on an alien oppression yet anyone over a certain age is routinely taken away in the dead of night to be eaten, where scrappy rebel groups fight against a brutal alien force who sees humans as nothing more than entertainment but people are treated as though they’re just having a little sleep once their HP hits zero during an intense tactical encounter that takes a good half an hour to safely clear. The story didn’t need to be great, but it did need to pick a side and stick with it.
Rebelstar: Tactical Command doesn’t know what it wants to be. It definitely doesn’t want to be a new Rebelstar game where raiders assault grimy moonbases, but it doesn’t really want to be X-COM: Cartoon Edition either. It feels like a game so busy scavenging bits and pieces of what it used to be and then forcing them into a new and legally distinct environment it never really takes the time to imagine what fresh strategic avenues it could explore instead.
In spite of these issues this is clearly a good game—the basics are just too much fun for even problems of this magnitude to truly break them—the trouble is if a team with this vast amount of tactical gaming expertise under their belts had spent more time looking forward than back, it could’ve been a great one.
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 