I’ve been patrolling the sky since the 1980s and shooting down hostile aircraft at Flight Sims, but it’s flapping up on the single green pixels of the original Apple II Sublogic Flight Simulator. Since then, I have whipped Kill Latty on Tiger’s claws, crushed the rebellion with a tie fighter, shot the Red Baron with a gun, and fussed my apartment with a Microsoft Flight Simulator. So I was pretty tickled by the opportunity to spend a few hours with G-Rebels, an in-development game that combines several developments that I really love: an open-ended approach to aviation, blade runners, and gameplay. The impact of this design creates something curious, ambitious and potentially capable, but it remains to be seen whether it is well-tuned to find its footing.
G-Rebels is set after a climate disaster wipes out most of the world. You are currently one of many factions who pilot armed aircraft called Sky Blades among the skyscrapers of what looks like an unbranded blade runner LA. Search for enemies, human traffickers and fraudulent replicants in the air. Yes, they are actually called replicants… I’m not an expert in copyright law so please don’t ask me how to do that.
Currently, vehicle-oriented games need to meet very specific requirements to succeed. And then the G-Rebels problem begins. Flying around is more chore than a thrill. Sometimes it can even be boring.
G-Rebels calls Skyblade a glider, but the explanation is really not accurate. The nearest real world analogue is a helicopter. It is a helicopter because it can actually be placed anywhere. However, unlike a real chopper, most of the time there is no constant dance of hands and feet needed on the pilot’s side to stabilize things. Only altitude cornering or change places a great burden on the pilot at a rapid rate. Instead, your Skyblade will be hyaber, scoot and lie down effortlessly, like the avatars of a flying first-person shooter. If you’ve played ancient FPS games, things are creepy and familiar.
However, it takes a long time to get the real hang of the X-shaped sky blade. Compared to arcade shooters like Flight Sims and Star Wars Squadrons, there is little sense of momentum or gravity in the workplace. You can stop and shift the speed straight upwards from the front in a second, but everything feels strangely lacking. The Sky Blade has the operating characteristics of the Nissan SF. I’m already driving a Nissan reverse in real life and don’t need to bring that stable value into my fantasy world.
The upgrade is useful to some extent, especially when it comes to punching your gun and the speed of your straight line, but I still felt like I was updating my flying sedan to a flying minivan. Ultimately, the problem with G-Rebels is that the vehicle style fits the aesthetics of the blade runner, but the controls and functionality are bad matches for almost constant canyon flying. Further considerations must be made to the problems exacerbated by mission design: proximity warning and spatial awareness. This campaign is very simply frontloaded with escort duties and timing waypoint challenges. This is an anachronistic design that mitigates much of the abundance from the environment.
G-Rebels takes place over a flooded world where skyscrapers rise from the synthetic islands and live in a narrow space between waves of lightning and almost surrounding clouds. Hover other Skyblades in that space. Some are benign and others are piloted by malicious enemies. Mission design is very simple. Move to the waypoint, look around, find your target, and blow up yourself without dying.
There are stories, plots, characters, etc, but there’s not much I care about. The voice acting was scripted to Hanmee and delivered badly, making the other pilots’ tones have had a soulless ring, making them believe they were likely generated… It looked like they were looking at the Steam page. That’s very unfortunate.
Regarding G-Rebels, we should not talk about G-Rebels any more without pointing out the greatest sin. This is the presence of a dash from a waypoint to a waypoint in close timing. As a species, we thought we collectively agreed to cancel these horrible sections in the game after Superman 64, but the developers of G-Rebels clearly opposed it. It’s a gameplay experience that goes beyond me to think that everyone is sprinting through five waypoints over and over, on a rather elegant vehicle that I’m just learning to fly.
Not disappointed is the shooting that feels like one of the most realistic aspects of G-Rebels. Fans of Flight Sims and Arcade Flight Showers are very familiar with the available base modes. It is a guided missile system with a short range gun mode that is useful for dogfights and a much longer range that allows you to hit targets from vast distances with electronic lock-on. Both are thoughtfully designed. After my brain, I found that now almost instinctive flight sim programming works very well. A slightly leading turning target in close range usually ended with a solid hit. And adjusting the leads by distance worked as it should. The missiles were powerful, but the guns were so much fun that I was mostly stuck to them, sniping in and out from behind the megalithic building.
Your control panel and HUD are a victory in functional form. The dashboard screen can confuse relative position and altitude, and appears to alternate between being too little or too much information. The instrumentation feels like it’s designed to create a much more preview capture than quickly providing the information pilots need when flying anti-gravity tanks between tall buildings in thunderstorms.
There aren’t many traditional dogtails and energy tactics you’d expect from a flight game set in a planetary atmosphere. Gravity is not really that much of a factor, so dogfights are less chased than gunfires between flying tanks. There are strategies to learn and adopt, but most of what you’ve learned in other flying games doesn’t really apply here. Usually, first and fastest shoots are the best guarantee of victory.
The city itself has its potential, but in its current form it offers little particularly distinctive. The building is well rendered, but most of what you see feels really clear. It feels more like a set or stage made for video games than a real living breathing world.
G-Rebels may be really interesting, but it’s still a very in-depth work in progress now. It’s cool, but it’s not yet consistently fun. Mission and aircraft handling designs have a long way to go before it hits. You can see the possibilities of fun, but the parts have not yet gathered in the attractive formula. I haven’t seen the official release date for G-Rebels yet, but I am fully hoping that the team will have time to refine their ambitions and create a carefully tuned flight combat experience.
Jared Petty is a former Passthecontroller editor and likes to write about how great and stupid video games are. You can find him as a bluekey Blue skiing like Pettycommajared.
