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Rebel Galaxy Outlaw and some reflection on Steam Reviews

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Rebel Galaxy Outlaw is a fantastic open-world space game but Rebel Galaxy Outlaw has a terrible Steam reviews score. Are Steam reviews making us miss out on good games?

Linux gamers on Steam have a particularly close relationship with the Steam community. Before the days of ProtonDB it was Steam reviews and discussion pages where we would find out how well the game ran on Linux (excepting, of course, this publication). We also may be the most outspoken minority on Steam. Think of the obligatory "Will this come to linux?" Steam discussion post. We should be proud that our feedback can be especially helpful to developers.

There are tireless Linux gamers dedicated to producing Steam reviews with Linux in mind (check out cbones, Houtworm, and the GamingOnLinux Steam group). However, I have come to realize that my faith in Steam reviews may have come at a cost, and perhaps you will to. Think of a game that you love and believe most gamers should love, but which has an incomprehensibly poor rating on Steam. If you came up with one, we share something. If you can't think of one, sort your Steam library by Steam review and take a look near the bottom to see what you can find. This article is about Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, its 'Mixed' steam rating, and the system of Steam reviews upon which many of us rely.


You can sort your Steam library by rating to find games you have played with poor ratings.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw (RGO) is the sequel to the indie hit Rebel Galaxy and a spiritual successor to the Privateer franchise. It's an open world space game with light simulation elements and an old-school Western feel that plays great on my aging Geforce 1070 via Proton at 4K with maxed settings. There are some reports on ProtonDB that you need to install mfc42 from Protontricks, with GE-Proton7-30 I did not need to.

We play as Juno, a cynical spacer down on her luck, on a meandering adventure through Dodge Sector: a collection of stellar systems replete with various unsavoury characters, most of whom speak in a distinctly Deep South accent. Firefly is clearly a source of inspiration. You can fly trade routes, mine asteroids, take mercenary contracts, bounty hunt, smuggle contraband, and rob traders blind at gunpoint. The visual aesthetic is a delightful oversaturated kaleidoscope. It's well optimized and runs buttery smooth. The combat is smooth and satisfying. The writing and voice acting bounces between well-done and superb. It has a simulated economy with random events and fluctuating prices.  It has an embedded GIMP-like application for custom ship paintjobs. It has space station bars where you can play full-fledged minigames of dice-poker, 8-ball, slots, and Asteroids. You can flip twin birds to your enemies from inside your cockpit. It has the best licensed soundtrack of any game I have ever played, spread over seven different radio stations.

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 Content warning: Watch Juno rob innocent traders, destroy dastardly pirates, and sometimes both at once. Cringe as Juno fails at Asteroids on an arcade cabinet. One very mild story spoiler.

And yet despite all this, RGO has a resoundingly 'Mixed' rating from gamers on Steam. No review bombs, no political brigading, no glaring technical issues or mentions of Epic exclusivity, just gamers that don't recommend RGO to their peers. The complaints in negative reviews vary wildly; the game is too different from the original, the controls are poor, the game is repetitive, too difficult, or too simple. It's tough to pin down what gamers didn't like. The gaming press, on the other hand, liked RGO considerably more. On OpenCritic, 84% of critics recommend the game, with an average score of 77%.

There are plenty of criticisms in the Steam reviews that I agree with. The mouse and keyboard controls are not great (I play with a Steam Controller). There isn't the same amount of content as games like Elite; I'm 20 hour in to the game and I'm starting to upgrade to what I suspect is the highest equipment tier. The main story, while good, is spread a little thin. But given the positives, none of these complaints should be death-knells to a 30$ USD game that regularly goes on sale for 6$ USD. The mismatch between RGO's Steam rating and its positive qualities simply doesn't make sense. And what if RGO is not a one-off case, but one of countless games unjustly ignored because of poor Steam reviews?


  Privateer fans will feel right at home in the cockpit view

The wisdom of crowds is the idea that the Law of Large Numbers from statistics can be applied to people's individual decisions. It roughly states that given a large number of independent assessments, the mean of those assessments will be correct. To the (albeit limited) extent that the quality of a game is objective, one is tempted to take Steam reviews very seriously indeed; after all, regular gamers are probably less likely than journalists to be influenced by each other (independence) and there are a lot of gamers writing steam reviews (large numbers).

For me, Steam reviews have been something close to gospel. An 'Overwhelmingly Positive' score is nearly an automatic wishlist. My brain translates a 'Mostly Positive' into 'Move Past', and a 'Mixed' into 'Melanoma'. There are benefits to this extreme faith in Steam reviews. If you play and browse through a lot of games it's difficult to investigate each game thoroughly, and a Steam review score offers a simple heuristic for whether to linger on a game's store page or move on. However, since discovering how fantastic RGO is, I'm haunted by the idea that I've been missing out.

A user-created paintjob for one of the ships in RGO, turning their cargo hauler into a mobile whiskey distillery for the premier in-game whiskey brand.

Steam reviews are also a mixed bag for developers. For better or worse, Steam reviews make developers more responsive to the reviewer feedback. As the average gamer has more conservative taste than your average journalist, the Steam review system may makes developers more cautious when experimenting. The Steam review system likely favours lower-spec gamers and smaller gamer communities (like ours) compared with mainstream gaming journalism. A positive rating can be especially useful with smaller titles that don't have a lot of attention from gamer press or content creators. There are also unambiguous drawbacks to Steam reviews: buyers are more likely to complain than praise, trolling/brigading, out-of-date Early Access reviews, and the high playtime negative reviews (for bad reasons), to name a few.


  A couple of Elite: Dangerous reviews. One complains about the entirely optional multiplayer gamemode, the other is too busy playing Elite to elaborate.

Well, what's the solution? How do we as gamers balance the tempting simplicity of the Steam reviews system with its drawbacks, and the possibility of missing out on gems? Perhaps as you have guessed, there is no simple answer. All we can do is be aware of the limitations of the Steam review system and adjust our own mental processes accordingly. Personally, I will keep using Steam reviews as a useful tool in deciding how much time to spend looking into a game, but finding RGO has left me humbled. Now my brain reads 'Mixed' as 'Maybe another Rebel Galaxy Outlaw'. Which isn't all that bad; if the cost to finding another RGO is moving a little slower through my discovery queue, I think it's a fair trade.

Addendum: The only other game I own with a 'Mixed' rating that I loved is Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, but there I at least understand the Mixed rating: people wanted a horror game and got a walking simulator. I'm curious to hear what other people come up with.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Editorial, Misc, Steam
31 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I'm a long-time Linux user and a long-time gamer, and have enjoyed combining these two hobbies over the past 10 years or so. When I'm not gaming or working, you can find me annoying my cat, watching movies, or raving about my 40% keyboards to anyone I can corner.
See more from me
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37 comments
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denyasis Sep 16, 2022
Quoting: anewson
Quoting: voxI can't get out of my head the sad story of Star Ruler 2 developers. It was not an easy game to jump into, because they innovated on the 4x/grand strategy formula and made a bunch of systems and game mechanics that were never seen in this genre as far as I know. And once it clicked, it was (and still is) the best game that I've played in this genre.

wishlisted this, I like the genre and it looks like a lot of fun.

No need to wishlist it. It's free and OpenSource (I think the assets might be closed, but are freely available with the Open source download). It includes the DLC. Pretty sure the GitHub link is pinned on the Steam forum.

Edit, here you go: https://github.com/BlindMindStudios/StarRuler2-Source

Builds just fine for me and is genuinely a really good game. It definitely experimented with some new ideas, which I think turned out pretty good.


Last edited by denyasis on 16 September 2022 at 6:56 pm UTC
Philadelphus Sep 16, 2022
QuoteFor me, Steam reviews have been something close to gospel.
Interesting. For me, I barely pay attention to them. That's not to say I pay no attention to them, but I generally put a lot more stock in going and looking up footage of a game I'm potentially interested in, and I generally only check for a negative rating if I'm already feeling turned off by a game. Five minutes of watching someone play can say a lot more about whether I'll personally enjoy a game than a few dozen poorly-spelled one-sentence reviews from people I don't know. I have found individual longer reviews (both positive and negative) helpful in the past, but there are plenty of games I've bought where I didn't bother reading any reviews beforehand, based on information I got about them elsewhere.
anewson Sep 16, 2022
Quoting: beko

There be video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMyhMWcH5xo
holy crap that's an awesome setup... you make me miss my Saitek X52 terribly. o7 commander

Quoting: eldarionAnyway, to me, the game is awful for one basic but extremely important point: the keyboard & mouse controls are a disaster.
yea, I agree - the KB/M controls are rough, I might have given up on RGO entirely if I didn't have a controller.

Quoting: no_information_hereGood Article! Under-rated games from my library:

InnerSpace 62%
https://store.steampowered.com/app/347000/InnerSpace/
someone else mentioned InnerSpace to me as an overlooked gem, also Liam really liked it. I'll have to check it out


Last edited by anewson on 16 September 2022 at 7:29 pm UTC
beko Sep 16, 2022
Quoting: anewsonholy crap that's an awesome setup... you make me miss my Saitek X52 terribly. o7 commander
Heh, I guess you did see the Elite Dangerous setup ? Thank you and o7
WMan22 Sep 17, 2022
Like Steam Deck Verified/ProtonDB, I treat steam reviews like a suggestion not a concrete law.

I would hate to see a world without them since I don't trust publications like Kotaku, Polygon, or IGN these days; When I see Mostly Positive or Mixed, I start reading the reviews to see what exactly is wrong with it, maybe there's a big technical issue, maybe the developer abandoned it, maybe the developer was acting rude to people on social media, maybe the game is only 3 hours long while costing $40-$60.

Reviews tell me, and by extension the developer, important information. I understand why people want to demonize the review system, but they should instead be demonizing the people who are treating it as a general indicator of sentiment rather than a tool to become more informed about what you are buying. It'd be catastrophic if they were ever removed, in my opinion. I would buy way less games cause I wouldn't be able to trust much.
epsaavedra Sep 17, 2022
To anyone with doubts about this game, play it please! It's quite a gem of a game. Think of it as Endless Sky in 3D with one of the best soundtracks ever in gaming.
vox Sep 17, 2022
Quoting: anewsonwishlisted this, I like the genre and it looks like a lot of fun.
Quoting: denyasisNo need to wishlist it. It's free and OpenSource (I think the assets might be closed, but are freely available with the Open source download). It includes the DLC. Pretty sure the GitHub link is pinned on the Steam forum.

Edit, here you go: https://github.com/BlindMindStudios/StarRuler2-Source

Builds just fine for me and is genuinely a really good game. It definitely experimented with some new ideas, which I think turned out pretty good.

There's also this project, lead by the most productive modder in the community. It's newer, but it doesn't run for me for some reason (but I'm a noob, so that's expected)
https://github.com/OpenSRProject/OpenStarRuler

You need to buy the game, though, to have music for example.
okasion Sep 17, 2022
Quoting: fagnerlnIt's impossible to exist a system with user rating which works, I lost any hope on this. It's utopic

Look at Steam green light, it was awesome in theory: the community curate the content that will reach the store, and the developer don't need to spend money. The reality: a lot of amazing titles stayed on the limbo, while the community keep pushing meme games. Result: valve removed greenlight, now the dev need to put money and any game goes to the store. So we have good games but there's no filter, every day a ton of trash published.

Valve keep trying: the curatory system doesn't work too, the timeline system is helpful to identify review bombing but still don't fix anything - I mean, a review bomb can be valid, and some reviews "out of the bubble" will be ignored.

When I want some game, I simply look for videos on YouTube and look for a reviewer that I agree most of the time.

When I see that a game are injusticed on steam, I leave a small review to help

This, I would also like to add that in this particular case, I never heard of it. I think everyone who knows the OG Privateer would love to try this, specially if it works so well in your aging Geforce 1070 (I bought a 1030 one month ago for my birthday). Again, in this particular case I would blame the PR, also, this is the first time I read about this game on GOL too.
Shugyousha Sep 17, 2022
As someone who played the original WC: Privateer back in the 90s, I really enjoyed what I played of this game. Now that I have a steam deck I am sincerely hoping that I will be able to finish it there!

If you liked the original Privateer (or Privateer 2) I would whole-heartedly recommend that you give Rebel Galaxy Outlaw a try!

It's just a real shame that the game didn't get the reception that I think it deserved and that people basically mopped one of the main developers out of his profession ...

Fun fact: apparently the game is built with https://www.ogre3d.org/. I also think the game is gorgeous (those cockpits! :swoon:) but my graphics standards may be somewhat low since I grew up with the old Privateer games and thought they looked great at the time as well ...
Kimyrielle Sep 17, 2022
To be fair, as awesome as the game otherwise might be, I expect to be able to play -any- PC game at least reasonably well with mouse/KB. I wouldn't have appreciated having bought the game only to find out I can't really play it. While I bought a Steam Controller for giggles back then, I am still utterly not used to this kind of device and couldn't seriously play with one.


Last edited by Kimyrielle on 17 September 2022 at 8:17 pm UTC
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