So, I was a big fan of Plague Inc when it first came out and avidly played a lot of it. The strategic layers, the different approaches to scenarios, and the effort put into making it as accurate as possible (or at least relatively close to the real deal) were impressive.
And then Rebel Inc came out and I was pretty excited… but I held off on buying it. Surely it must be good, but I wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about the general premise and what I heard about it, so I just waited for a sale or something.
Well, this month it was part of Humble Choice and as you may have noticed in my post, I wasn’t as much of a fan of this one.
So, as part of our monthly Blaugust Reviewers kinda tradition, I’ll talk a bit about Rebel Inc and why I dislike it today.
Developer: Ndemic Creations Publisher: Ndemic Creations Genre: Political Sim, Strategy, Whack-a-Mole-Sim Release Date: Octobher 13th, 2021 Reviewed on: PC Available on: PC Copy was purchased via Humble Choice.
Let me lead by saying that while I may not be a fan of this game, I think grabbing it through Humble Choice is worth it. 100%. On top of this game, you also get access to a plethora of other titles from House of Ashes, Lords and Villeins, Mr. Prepper, Metal Hellsinger, The Quarry, A Juggler’s Tale, and Spirit of the Island. Check out those reviews here for more info. :)
Rebel Inc has you step into the shoes of an NGO, trying to help people in a war-torn country by establishing certain programs to create healthcare, education and job infrastructure.
Poverty is high and education is low; just like in many countries in the real world.
So, you set up your HQ wherever you want and start to fund certain programs. Education, actual toilets, and even streets and electricity. Everything takes one click and it’s suddenly done. All these programs garner support and help your reputation. Wow.
At first, your intervention is met with a lot of resistance. People just don’t like outsiders meddling in their affairs, I reckon, but over time, you “stabilize” the country by essentially convincing everyone that you’re “the good guys”. It doesn’t even matter whether or not you’re helping them or whether you achieve something. Number goes up, all is good.
All you need to do is sit back and roll out those programs… and be careful about corruption and inflation.
You get money in certain intervals and just gotta be careful not to create too much corruption and inflation by “helping”. After all, this money stays in the country and doesn’t leave, creating more problems. Just like in the real world.
But then the unspeakable happens: Insurgents pop up that don’t like what you do. I can hear them shouting “Stop right there, humanitarian scum!” before they proceed to arrest you. They don’t make prisoners, though. They just take over the country with their troops, fighting toilets with guns and other violence.
If you’ve played Plague Inc, you may know that you play as a virus or disease or parasite and you try to infect everyone in the world before eventually flicking the “kill switch”. Your opponents in that game are scientists trying to find a cure, so it eventually turns into a battle against time. Can you infect and kill everyone before they get rid of you?
That system makes a lot of sense because the scientists need to first realise that you exist which adds a layer of strategy to the game where you need to try and be inconspicuous and spread far and wide before they find out about you… Makes sense.
In Rebel Inc, however, I’m supposed to believe that this country is war-torn and struggling because of said wars… then we help them out by providing aid and creating infrastructure… and because we help them out, they start rebelling?
The premise is to help people and stabilize the war-torn country, but in my opinion, it looks like you’re the cause of the war. You establish your humanitarian help and your good work and all that… and then those darn rebels show up and try to take over the country!
It’s weird. Wouldn’t the rebels already be there when we first arrived? Wouldn’t that actually make the game more challenging and lend itself to more and more difficulty, as well as scenarios that are actually unique?
Anyhow, once the rebels appear, your humanitarian NGO that takes care of toilets and education suddenly starts to train soldiers to combat the rebels. You know, standard stuff. Humanitarianism goes brr.
This is where the core gameplay of managing corruption, inflation and funds is sort of coming to an end. We’re now playing an RTS game! Time to get control over the map and kill all the rebels! Yay.
So, you move your units around and when you win battles, the rebels flee to other territories, so you gotta chase after them.
Eventually, this game isn’t about helping the people but about killing the rebels. It’s about violence. It’s about war! After all, it never went wrong when a First-World country sent soldiers into a war-torn country to “make” peace. Never. At all. In the real world.
But the units you receive from the UN are just temporary and if you extend their stay, you lose reputation. Certain other actions lose reputation, too. If you have no reputation left, you lose, no matter how much support the people give you. That said, you also lose if the rebels keep multiplying and taking over a certain amount of territories. You lose in a lot of ways.
Your win-con is managing your reputation and killing all the rebels. There is no other option. But if you kill them all, you still need to find support with the people… and if the fighting drags on for long enough, you just have to kill more rebels and then start peace talks.
Once you do win, you move on to the next map… and you do the same thing. Again. There is practically no difference between the first map and the sixth. You help the people, rebels pop up, and now you kill the rebels.
This isn’t a political sim… it’s a rebel extermination sim.
In fact, the game pretends to be a bit of an RTS game but the actual gameplay isn’t actually all that deep or engaging like real RTS games.
This is a whack-a-mole sim.
And it gets boring and frustrating fast. Almost, as if the rebels know that they don’t have to win battles but just tank your reputation to win.
Multiplayer is similar by the way. You either play as the rebels, trying to make the opponent ragequit… or you play as the NGO, struggling against actual players that just are there to frustrate you.
It’s not unique, deep or engaging. It’s just kinda frustrating.
What adds to the frustration is that you cannot train the military until the rebels show up. Civil soldiers from the country are worse than the ones sent by the UN and take much longer to be trained before they can be deployed. But UN soldiers are temporary and cost you a reputation to uphold them.
Honestly, I’m just not sure if this is the right premise for a game like this.
A good political sim sends a message or makes the player think… but this one isn’t good because all I get from this is “interfering with another country, even to just help with hygiene causes strife and war”… or “the only solution to war is more war”… or “whoever we deem as insurgents are bad and must be killed”. There’s no other option.
So, how do we summarise all this ranting? Well, Rebel Inc tries to do a lot of things but none of them well.
It tries to be a political sim that doesn’t offer any other options aside from violence (and peace talks that come from violence). It tries to be an RTS game but it doesn’t have any of the depth required for that and just feels boring and frustrating.
The thing is that if it stuck to its lane and tried to do one thing well, it would be amazing… but at the moment, it just feels so… anti-“fun”, which is a huge disappointment given that I know that they can do better. Again, I liked Plague Inc. It was great.
Similarly, all the maps are just the same scenario but on a different map. It never actually feels like you’re playing a more challenging game. At one point, you’re doing well, and suddenly the difficulty ramps up all the way due to flipping rebels.
Anyway, perhaps there’s a good game somewhere in here but I just don’t see it.
Around 83% of the reviews are positive, so, there’re a lot of people that really like this game… but it just doesn’t feel like it’s by Ndemic Creations.
This feels like a bad Plague Inc clone made by someone who thought they could just insert the gameplay formula and change the premise without ever questioning whether the premise would actually work or be fun.
What a disappointment.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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