While Plague Inc. captivated with its innovative gameplay and engaging mechanics, Rebel Inc: Escalation falls short. Its repetitive gameplay and lack of depth fail to match the excitement of its predecessor. Plague Inc. shines with its polished presentation and regular updates, highlighting the missed opportunities of Rebel Inc: Escalation. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3256170711 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3258082694

An addictive and entertaining RTS from the makers of Plague Inc. that shines a light on the political dilemmas faced in bringing about a liberal and free republic to a country ravaged by insurgents. While it makes assumptions that the West are acting in good faith, there is still value in playing this game regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum: its adept at showing how precarious a fledgling democracy can be when there are many factions hoping for it to die before it even gets a chance.

Full Review @ Choicest Games[www.choicestgames.com]

Rebel Inc: Escalation is a FREE mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a paid product, as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs, to try scam PC gamers into paying money for free mobile apps. Apalling and unacceptable. This mobile app is basically a heavy reskin of Plague Inc, the old game where you manipulate a virus to take over the world, choosing evolutions to increase your infection rate, lethality, or avoid efforts to stop you. This is exactly the same game, except swap "virus" for "rebels", and choose adaptations that increase the rate of spread of your rebellion ideology, resist attempts for the government to stop you, and swap the world map for a map of the country you're taking over. That's really it... a lame rebadge to try rehash and profit from the same game with a slightly different artificial flavour.

From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The mobile app features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this mobile app does.

Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.

These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

In an insult to gamers everywhere, the mobile app features advertising on the menu screen! Whether this is for their own products or for third parties, this is absolutely unacceptable to pollute the user space with this kind of garbage. Does the developer think we're mobile gamers and that Steam is just another mobile app store? That might be understandable (but not acceptable) if this was a free mobile app... But people paid (wasted) money on this and now the developer is trying to extort even more revenue by advertising to the audience. This is completely unacceptable and is yet another reason gamers should avoid this. It's a greedy, offensive practice that simply must not be tolerated.

So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $15 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay a premium for a free mobile app just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend.

FIFTEEN BUCKS FOR A FREE MOBILE APP. Just who do they think we are?