Rebel Inc: Escalation Review (NightEmpress)
I'm very conflicted about whether or not to recommend this game, because it's not horrible. Ultimately I decided that I wouldn't recommend the game, and I will explain why.
I will start with the positives. The concept is very interesting. The premise of the game is to rebuild a country (clearly Afghanistan, without being named in-game) while fending off rebel insurgents, and managing your reputation and avoiding overspending to control inflation. You also choose a governor and a cabinet of advisors, each of which has different effects on the game. This is quite clever.
The problems with the game come in the implementation. The rebel insurgents can be FAR too aggressive. The coalition soldier units end up having to be recalled after a certain amount of time passes lest your reputation suffer greatly (which can cause you to lose a game). So, you have to also train national soldiers. Unfortunately, training them takes much longer, and they are far weaker until you max out all the power-ups.
Soldiers of all types also move around the map far too slowly. So a good idea is to try to box in the first cell of insurgents to pop up in order to prevent them from spreading, but they will eventually pop up on other parts of the map with increasing frequency.
This makes for a challenging game, which isn't bad, but some of the later maps introduce additional game play elements which make managing everything extremely tedious. Despite playing the game for many hours, there are some maps I can't beat even on easy (yet).
The pacing is also very odd. It's very slow paced, and eventually, you have to start negotiations with the insurgents. One that gets going, game play picks up a bit in pace. Once negotiations are complete, you win. However it feels like this feature was tacked on last minute to speed up the pace, as if they realized it was way too slow and tedious. So it seems like introduced the mechanic after realizing that during development.
Another issue is that there are not nearly enough maps. To get the full game you need both DLCs in addition to the base game. However, each DLC only adds one map each, along with a handful of governors and advisors. Ultimately, it feels like the game isn't worth the price unless you get it on sale for a cheap price.