Rebel Inc is the spiritual successor to Plague Inc, a game about infecting the whole world with a deadly virus. In this version of the strategy genre, you have to manage a region of the world in turmoil after a war and get to 100% stability in order to win. To do so, you have a wide range of upgrades you can buy and tactics to deploy, especially when insurgents decide to come into play and require you to act militarily as well. I had an okay time with this game but ultimately found it was too much of a numeric mess with so much data that I just couldn’t process it all and had to make uninformed decisions, which never feels great.
Each game starts the same, you arrive in a new region and must stabilize it. You can unlock advisors by playing the game - or paying real money - that change the rules a bit (which is cool) but you then use your budget to buy upgrades from a variety of tech trees. Each upgrade does very specific things, increasing support, giving you more options when it’s time to take decisions and placing soldiers on the map, among other things. Some upgrades are more effective in rural areas, others work better when the population is rallied to your cause, and these minutia are a bit hard to parse, there are a ton of civilian upgrades that more or less all seem to do the same thing, but in reality you really need to figure out what’s more valuable for you in a given situation.
Upgrades might also increase inflation - making other upgrades more costly - and corruption, which will drain your support over time and might make you lose, so you need to balance these out as well. You’ll also get decisions to take based on the upgrades you get, which is interesting. For instance, upgrades to root out corruption might ask you to chose between arresting powerful corrupt authority figures, risking the loss of stability, or accusing foreign nations of supporting the insurgents. The game will tell you the odds that these options will work, and if you can’t choose them you’ll know why. Where Rebel Inc really gets tough is when insurgents come into play.
Insurgents will attack sectors of the map and take control of them, increasing their power. In order to fight them, you need troops that are either very costly and drain your reputation or slow and inefficient at first and need a bunch of upgrades to get good. Fighting insurgents is really rough and frustrating, you need a bunch of soldiers to defeat them for good, they’ll constantly drain your resources and reputation and while you have the option to just bomb them, I never did. Ultimately you need to negotiate with them and all decisions are bad ones, you just need to gauge how much more reputation you can lose in order to make the peace process advance faster while putting military pressure on the enemy.
I went back to Plague Inc and discovered that it was more or less the same number extravaganza than this game. I had an okay time with Rebel Inc! It’s certainly well made with lots of systems working together, but it’s a bit too stressful and difficult for me so I didn’t go and complete all missions to unlock all advisors. If you enjoy strategy games and aren’t afraid of a few numbers, I strongly recommend it!
