Rebel Galaxy

There are two types of space games: the top-down RTS style games that have about as much action as a spreadsheet, and dogfighting games that require you to have a joystick and actual piloting skills.
Rebel Galaxy is somewhere in the middle. Its space fighting can best be described as "battleships firing broadsides at one another". It's a simplified space flight model, 'technically' 3D, but all the action happens in a 2D plane. It's frantic enough to be fun, but still simple enough for non-pilots to master.
The world of Rebel Galaxy has elements of questing, trading, piracy, and exploration. I would compare it to Freelancer from the 90s. It's all very simplified, of course, because it's a budget title, but getting 20 solar systems with a dozen planets each is still a ton of bang for your buck! Do we really need 10000 planets to be entertained?
The characters are sarcastic, the battles are plentiful, the 'space country' soundtrack sets a great atmosphere. Pilots will trash talk you over comms. The whole thing has a lot of attitude and charm. It reminds me of Fallout 1 / 2. I didn't notice any major bugs, kudos to a small but efficient dev team.
Two thumbs up, a diamond in the rough!

I didn't know what I was buying when I got Rebel Galaxy. I expected a dumb indie game.
I was wrong. Rebel Galaxy is simple in concept, but all the game mechanics come together to create a deeply immersive and compelling experience.
Put simply, the game is a lot of fun... just pure fun. It doesn't punish you, it doesn't make you grind, but you still feel you've earned everything you got. It gives you purpose and meaning to everything you do which makes you want to fire it up randomly throughout your day.
I highly recommend this game.

Rebel Galaxy is an arcadey space game about how dope it would be if Assassin's Creed: Black Flag's ship combat were in space.

A fun little space romp game. Not too complicated trying to be one of the "X franchise" games or tedious like some other space sims that feel more like a "point and click adventure in Excel"

Here's a ship, here's how you fly it, here's how you use your "old school pirate ship" broadsides.
Go be the best little murderhobo in the galaxy.

Story is a bit mid range, missions sometimes repetitive or grindy, but then again its not trying to be "Game of the Year" either. Its an old school space sim from 2015. If you grew up on games like this, you'll have fun.
This is a game I often come back to just for some lighthearted "fly around and blow shit up" vibes.

Thumbs up I do recommend :)

Get it on sale.
Get it for the soundtrack.
Get it for the vibes.
Get it for the unique experience of being a deep-space trucker who's also heavily armed and trigger happy.
It feels a little wonky and unfinished. Get it anyway.

A bit grindy, but still fun. Combat is more like a sailing game than a sci-fi space game. No dog fighting, most of your fire power comes from the broadside cannons, with a few auto turrets to augment. It's more than just fighting, though the side quests are basically limited to fetch quests, escort missions, and combat. The map is massive, and it is totally open world. The ship designs are fantastic and being able to not only upgrade your components, but buy a new ship entirely is a fun feature. Feels like there's something to work towards!

It's a very nice little game.

The story itself is short, but the corner of the galaxy you're in has its charm, with well voice acted character, excellent soundtracks (which you can customize. Personally I went with Cowboy Bebop), and very beautiful graphics that renders space and spaceships spectacularly well.

Where Rebel Galaxy truly shines is its gameplay loop. It is basically a progression to the top, looking for better guns to put on bigger ships with thicker shields. The progression isn't all vertical though.
I had much fun getting right behind bigger ships with my more manoeuvrable corvettes and drilling their hull where they couldn't blast me. Or escaping swarms of fighters, only to slow down a bit and snipe a few before fleeing again.
Additionally, while it wasn't my desire, you can very well roleplay as a more civilian entrepreneur, mining and trading enormous hauls to sell where the market is best. Combat is still very much an important factor, but you don't need to be a military dreadnought to roll over would be pirates.

So skill and style of gameplay have their place.

Piloting a ship can be a bit strange at first, but the game ease you into it. It is on a 2d map, meaning you'll never have to manage the verticality, except for some fighters who fly all over the place, but automated turrets knows how to reach them.

As for the difficulty, do not worry too much. If you reach the limit of your skill, the game rewards patience and diligence. Do some missions, earn your money on a more manageable system, and then buy yourself a better equipment. It will make all the difference. By the end, I had the biggest ship fully upgraded, a flat death star, and only in the most dire situation did I need to manoeuvre a bit. Otherwise, I just had to be there, and rotate a bit for everything to explode around.
If you do missions though, nI recommend not taking any escort missions. The AI can be frustrating on several levels.

Finally, the story.
It is short, but sweet. I was really hoping the end wasn't the end, the story of this weird chasing of mysterious artefacts with half the badlands gunning for us made me smile. I grew attached to the characters introduced (that I didn't kill for being double-crossing pyjacks), and I can only wish there would be more of them.
But it is just an adventure, with its heights, its doubts, its dangers, and in the end, its goodbyes.

All in all, a good game for a few hours of fun. And perhaps to return to once in a while.