This isn't the typical expansion where each side gets a handful of new ships and guns. All are tricked out with new capital ships and unique tech. The three races of the earlier Sins games-the Advent, the Trader Emergency Coalition, and the Vasari-have been expanded to six with the creation of Loyalist and Rebel factions for each group. While the core of Rebellion remains familiar, the gameplay has been stretched in significant ways. Zooming in on battles reveals some incredibly cinematic moments. These skirmish scenarios can take many hours to play, however, depending on the size of the map you select. The main drawback in the core feature set is the continuing absence of a campaign, so you're stuck playing one-off skirmish matches against AI opposition or human players in the online and LAN multiplayer. The heads-up display looks a little cluttered, especially the left side of the screen that tracks vessels, but it lets you avoid micromanagement hell. The user interface is still terrific, allowing you to keep balls in the air without everything crashing down due to an excess of information. Gameplay remains focused on building a space empire in the far future through constructing massive battle fleets, colonizing planets and asteroids, gathering metal and crystal resources, stuffing the bank account full of credits, engaging other species diplomatically, and even spreading your culture across the spaceways like some kind of interstellar Roman Empire. Virtually all of the material in the original Sins of a Solar Empire and its previous Diplomacy and Entrenchment expansions is front and center in Rebellion. But they also draw a lot of fire, so they aren't invincible. All of this fine-tuning of the feature set doesn't quite warrant the $40 price tag (although owners of the previous games in the series can qualify for a $10 break), but for that cash outlay you get a greatly modified version of a classic RTS game that will keep you forging galactic empires for many hours. This results in an ingeniously refined new experience that leans on a number of adjustments and additions to features like victory conditions, ship classes, and even the graphical engine. Developer Ironclad Games hasn't reinvented the wheel, choosing to tweak the four-year-old franchise's fundamentals instead of tearing things up. Sins of a Solar Empire reaches new heights with the stand-alone expansion Rebellion, which is the best way yet to play this 4X space real-time strategy game.
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