G-Rebels Review

A rain-soaked return to the skies that fans of G-Police have been waiting decades for.

You've probably never expected a small, scrappy German studio to be the one to bring back a genre that basically vanished off the map twenty-five years ago, but that's exactly what's happening with G-Rebels. Reakktor Studios, the team behind it, has actually been making games since 1991, so this isn't some green outfit chasing a trend, and once you spend a few hours in the cockpit, you can tell.

G-Rebels is being talked about as the spiritual successor to G-Police, that ambitious PlayStation game from 1997 that put you inside a VTOL gunship patrolling the colony domes of a future world. G-Rebels rebuilds that same fantasy from the ground up, except now you get an open world, a full campaign, racing, smuggling, bounty work, and a level of production you wouldn't expect from a studio still in Early Access.

It launched on Steam in July, carrying a thirty-dollar price tag, and from the moment you boot it up, you can feel that the people making it actually understood what made the original click. The world you're dropped into is the year 2684, long after the planet has gone under.

Almost all of Earth is flooded, and whatever's left of humanity is crammed into enormous floating megacities, all of them scrapping over what little dry land and resources remain. You start out as a rookie assigned to an elite unit called Octane, based in a city called Daevos, part of a wider cluster of settlements known as the Atlas archipelago.

On paper, your job is simple: keep the peace, hunt down corruption, and protect the city from smugglers, traffickers, and rogue replicants roaming the traffic lanes above the streets. In practice, Octane operates above the law, and you're teamed up with a partner, Eli Carter, who's very much the jaded, rule-bending type who's been waiting years for a decent ship while you show up flying the newest prototype in the fleet.

That setup doesn't stay simple for long once the missions start piling up.

As you get pulled deeper into missions, you start bumping into criminal factions, shady contracts, and conspiracies that make you question whether the people signing your orders are actually the good guys. It's not subtle storytelling, and it doesn't try to be. It leans hard into that late-nineties sci-fi action vibe, closer to Blade Runner crossed with a buddy-cop thriller than anything cerebral, and that directness works in its favor.

Once you're airborne, G-Rebels is essentially built around one core idea: you spend almost all your time in your Skyblade, and everything else branches off from that. At launch, you're looking at around twenty handpicked missions, with nine of them making up the first story chapter, plus a stack of side content layered around it, including races, bounty hunting, escort runs, and smuggling jobs.

The structure is straightforward. You pick up a job, fly out to your target, and depending on what's asked of you, you'll be racing through checkpoints, tailing a target through traffic, defending a convoy, delivering cargo, or getting pulled into a story beat.

You're never really doing anything wildly complicated on a mechanical level, but the appeal comes from just how good it feels to fly this thing through a dense, living city. Weaving between skyscrapers, dropping through gaps, keeping a clean line through a race route, chasing something all the way from the open sky down into the tighter, cluttered parts of Daevos- all of that is where G-Rebels shows what it's actually good at.

The city isn't just scenery here.

It genuinely shapes how missions play out, giving you cover, forcing detours, and adding scale to whatever fight you're in. Combat in G-Rebels runs on a scanner system before it runs on your guns. You'll aim your delta scanner at a target Skyblade and hold it steady until the readout locks, which is how you identify suspects, replicants, or wanted criminals hiding among the regular air traffic.

Once you've got a target confirmed, you're free to engage with your main cannon, and later on you unlock homing missiles that you can lock onto an enemy's signature once they've been scanned. Combat plays like a blend of an arcade shooter and something closer to a proper sim, closer in spirit to something like Freespace 2 than a straightforward dogfighter.

Your ship carries shields that regenerate on their own over time, but hull damage sticks around and needs an actual repair stop to fix, so you can't just fly recklessly forever. What stands out is the flight model itself. It doesn't handle like a jet, and it doesn't play like a helicopter either. 

The Skyblade has genuine weight and momentum behind it, but it's also free to move in pretty much any direction without needing to maintain forward speed, which takes a little adjusting but starts feeling natural fast. Not everyone might agree on this part, though.

Naturally, that unconventional feel might split opinion right down the middle.

Some flight sim purists reckon the handling lacks any real weight and floats around more like a balloon in the wind than a proper aircraft, while others feel it's got plenty of heft once you get used to how it moves. Either way, this is one of the areas the developers have already flagged for further tuning as Early Access continues.

On the plus side, dogfights genuinely deliver: you're lowering shields with sustained cannon fire, finishing enemies off with a missile, and watching the explosion play out, and while some fights against multiple targets can run a bit long, landing your shots consistently feels satisfying once you know where to aim.

There isn't a heavy grind-for-XP loop weighing G-Rebels down, but there is a credit-based progression system tied to completing missions. Every job you finish earns you money, and that money goes straight into upgrading your Skyblade at the shop back at base.

 You can pour credits into better engines for more speed, stronger shields, upgraded cannons, missile capacity, and further down the line, extra gear like AI-controlled drones and stealth modules. Early on, you won't have anywhere near enough credits to buy everything you want, so you end up picking a direction, whether that's speed for racing, survivability for combat, or just getting your main weapon hitting harder.

That reward loop is only half the picture, though; the other half is how the world around it looks.

It's a simple loop, but it works, because it gives every mission you complete a clear payoff, and it slowly turns your generic starting ship into something that actually feels like yours. Visually, G-Rebels is doing some genuinely startling work for a studio this size, and it's one of the best-looking games to come out this year regardless of its Early Access tag.

Daevos and the surrounding sectors are dense, rain-slick, and packed with detail, and the game leans fully into that soaked cyberpunk aesthetic, all neon signage bouncing off wet streets and towers vanishing up into cloud cover. A full day-night cycle changes the mood constantly: nights are glowing and moody, days show off the sheer scale of the world, and sunsets wash the whole skyline in gold.

Weather rolls through dynamically too, with layered volumetric clouds and storms that actually affect visibility and atmosphere rather than sitting there as a backdrop. The world streams in seamlessly as you fly, without loading screens breaking up the experience, and there's an optional insane graphics setting for anyone running a high-end PC that pushes things even further.

Even smaller details got attention, like the menus, which have proper borders, animated backgrounds behind mission briefings, and functioning little screens inside the cockpit itself- the kind of polish you don't usually expect from a team still building the game out. The current map covers roughly 12,000 square kilometers, with more environments and additional megacities across the Atlas archipelago planned for future updates.

Sound design pulls just as much weight as the visuals.

The whole game is fully voice-acted, and the performances land with real weight instead of coming across flat or awkward. The soundtrack leans into that synth-heavy, moody score that immediately calls Blade Runner to mind, and it's constantly running underneath everything you do.

Individual sound effects get plenty of care too: storms genuinely rumble, explosions land with a heavy double-hit, first a smaller pop followed by a deeper, rolling boom, and your engine has a real presence without ever turning into overwhelming jet-fighter noise.

Menus and key moments get their own bass hits for emphasis, whether that's an explosion, a ship flying past, or an ambush kicking off. It's the kind of sound work that's easy to take for granted when it's done well, and G-Rebels does it well enough that it stands out rather than blending into the background.

There's also native VR support built in from launch, along with support for more advanced HOTAS and HOSAS flight setups, which is a genuinely rare thing to see from a studio this size this early. Mouse and keyboard tend to be the preferred way to play, giving you far more precision when aiming and maneuvering, while a standard controller can feel a little twitchy by comparison depending on your sensitivity settings.

Whichever setup you go with, VR adds a whole other layer worth mentioning on its own.

Playing in VR is a thrilling ride, thanks to the non-stop boosting, spinning, and aerial combat, but the motion intensity means it’s certainly not going to suit everyone. The tutorial itself does a decent job easing you into all of this without dragging on too long. 

You're walked through basic rotation and alignment, directional thrusters, ascent and descent boosters, and eventually unlock a turbine boost that noticeably speeds everything up once you've proven you can handle the basics.

From there you're handed waypoints to reach against the clock, which is as much about learning the handling as it is about testing your reflexes, before you're finally allowed to fire your first cannon shots against a set of runaway maintenance drones. It's a fairly gentle ramp-up, but it gets the fundamentals across without wasting your time, and by the time your first real mission in G-Rebels starts, the controls already feel second nature.

Not every mission in G-Rebels is a breeze, either. One stealth-style mission that demands slipping past police scanners while crossing the city is brutally unforgiving, often taking a couple dozen high-stakes attempts before finally cracking it.

That difficulty isn't a fluke, either; it's baked into the game's whole design philosophy.

Rather than feeling like a cheap difficulty spike, it comes across as the kind of old-school challenge that rewards actually learning a route and understanding how your Skyblade handles under pressure, and clearing it feels closer to mastering something than just surviving it. It's a nice throwback to an era when games weren't afraid to make you work for a win, and it stands out precisely because so few current releases bother anymore.

There are also a few smaller rough edges worth flagging since this is still Early Access. Combat feedback could use a bit more punch, particularly around knowing exactly how close you are to losing your ship mid-fight, and the pause menu currently defaults to asking if you want to quit to desktop the moment you hit escape a second time, rather than simply resuming play, which is a minor but genuinely annoying quirk.

None of this derails the experience, but they're the kind of small fixes that would go a long way toward smoothing things out as this Early Access build continues to develop. Being Early Access, G-Rebels isn't pretending to be finished, and it shouldn't be judged like it is.

Right now, the side missions in particular can feel a little thin once you've run through each type once, since checkpoint races, cargo runs, and bounty jobs all boil down to the same basic loop of flying somewhere, doing a thing, and flying back.

That's not lost on the developers, either.

The developers have already acknowledged this and put mission variety on their public roadmap as one of the things they're actively working on over the coming months, alongside continued tuning of the flight physics and expanding the world with new zones and additional megacities.

What's already here, though, is far from a rough sketch. The flight model works, the combat is tense and rewarding once you get a feel for it, the city genuinely shapes how missions play out, and the presentation, both visually and sonically, is already operating at a level way above what you'd expect from a team this size this early in development.

Taken as a whole, G-Rebels earns the attention it's getting. It's not trying to reinvent the genre it's reviving; it's trying to do right by it, and for the most part it succeeds. If you grew up on G-Police, or you've just been waiting for a proper open-world combat flight game set in a soaked, neon-lit dystopia, G-Rebels is already worth diving into, with a clear runway to get even better as Early Access continues.