Untimely Review: Rebel Inc: Escalation

Rebel Inc: Escalation is a good game that tackles a complex topic well but… well, there might be a issues with reducing post-conflict governance into a playable format.

War holds an incredibly strange place in the human imagination — almost everyone who isn’t a war profiteer will tell you how horrifying it is, it is an incredibly messy business, but as any American foreign policy expert will go on to tell you it is still a business. If you’ve got no morals you can make a lot of money investing in conflict zones, and a lot of the problems with resolving these conflicts and dealing with their aftermath come as the result of this sort of twisted and hideous logic.

Maybe that is why when I heard about Rebel Inc: Escalation I was excited to see their take on this complex and messy subject. Ndemic Creations are a developer that puts a lot of care and thought into their games, as proven both in Rebel Inc and their previous game Plague Inc.

Plague Inc was a delightfully grim strategy sim where you played as a pandemic attempting to eradicate humanity, but that grimness has been left behind in Rebel Inc. It is an odd beast that tackles an incredibly complex topic with a level of delicacy that is both good and bad.

For some reason, your attacking a foreign rival is unlikely to start an international war — and that might be a little silly. But hey, false flags and black ops gets a mention which is more than what most would do.

Before we go any further, I’ll just point out that Rebel Inc exists in two forms — a mobile game called Rebel Inc, and a PC version of that game called Rebel Inc: Escalation. They’re both the same game, just on different platforms with differences in controls and what part of the production cycle they’re in — the newer PC version of the game has less content ported over right now and is in early access. For brevity’s sake I’m talking about Rebel Inc: Escalation.

The core gameplay loop of Rebel Inc is fairly simple: you’re playing as a foreign entity that has been tasked by the local government with stabilizing a region that has recently been involved in a conflict (the game specifies that an invasion has ended and troops have withdrawn) by building infrastructure, supplying aid, providing jobs, and combating insurgents. You pick a governor and a set of advisers that provide differences to the way the game plays and you pick a region to play in.

The various “operation screens” act like tech trees and unlock initiatives that improve either the lives of the local population, the local government’s capability, or the military’s capacity to fight.

You either win when you stabilize the region by building up support for your operation or you lose when your reputation is destroyed. Much of the complexity comes from how the different things interact such as — the regions are divided into provinces with different attributes such as the roads they have, if they’re urban, rural or remote, and population. Insurgents tend to pop up in remote provinces on the edge of the map, though that may just be my experience.

As a game still in development it is definitely lacking features, but none of this is why I want to talk about Rebel Inc — it’s a very good skeleton of a game that will be able to handle the extra weight that fleshing it out will require. If you enjoyed Plague Inc, or are looking for a light-weight strategy sim game then keep an eye on it for the future.

However, I fear that the topic it has chosen may be irreducibly complex and that trying to simplify them into generic concepts may be slightly troublesome for a number of different reasons.

It is clear that they have taken great effort and even pride in being sensitive, the regions are devoid of any cultural landmarks or indicators that would give away where they are set — they are in a sentence; the western idea for what a war torn region might be like.

The mountains in the south are controlled by the insurgents, the blue units are coalition soldiers and the green units are national soldiers.

The regions themselves are a good mix of different inspirations — there are regions inspired by mountainous locations like Afghanistan or Myanmar, there is a desert that initially made me think of Mexico or Iraq, and there is a region that evokes a location one might find in Ukraine or Russia. There is nothing that will narrow it down to a specific conflict, and it is stripped of all possible references to cultures, places or times outside of a date that tracks how long you’ve been in the game. You start at the beginning of two-thousand and two and progress onwards until you win or lose. This appears to be a reference to the shift from the invasion of Afghanistan in two-thousand and one to the beginning of the rebuilding efforts under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan which began in two-thousand and two.

Here is where the first cause for concern arises — the game seems to model its understanding of conflict zones on Afghanistan and as such has some legacy that it imparts onto the idea of stabilizing warzones in general that can be troubling.

Afghanistan is by now transparently not the kind of war you want to hold up and say “this is a good example of how to handle a war and its aftermath” as it remains rife with war crimes, war profiteering and little to no progress towards rebuilding a country torn apart by western powers. These are things that are addressed briefly but in an abstract manner.

It was actually hard to get this screenshot for the article and there isn’t much at stake even if you handle this poorly.

For the most part you will be fighting insurgents with “coalition” military units — including airpower and drones. Airstrikes support your military units and have a chance to cause civilian casualties, if that happens you will get an event that pops up on screen and offers you choices on how to deal with the resulting damage. Coalition soldiers will upset locals, sometimes they will cause other problems though this seems somewhat rare. You need to manage corruption or your support and reputation will start to plummet, and you need to keep pressure on the insurgents or your support and reputation will start to plummet.

From a gameplay standpoint this is all good, it is an attempt to make an interesting game that has a level of reality to it but isn’t bogged down in too much reality. This is the point I’d like to make very clear — this is a game, it is designed to be a game and it works well as a game. My problem is not that it does not go far enough into reality because that would very likely not make an enjoyable game to play but rather that the topic itself is unable to be condensed in a way that will be satisfyingly sensitive to the subject at hand.

The insurgents in the north are pushing down into the valley, and their camps are in the mountains. You have to destroy the camps to stop the threat of insurgents.

There is a level of colonialism to this game which is unintentional, it is the vestiges of an imperial power imposing its will stripped bare to make it as generic as possible. You are literally playing the role of a governor who is placed in charge of saving a region of people without healthcare, access to water, lacking in education and whose demographics are reduced down to if they like, dislike or are neutral towards you.

It cuts out all of the grind that a local power would need to go through in order to pull themselves up after a war destroys their country by giving you dictatorial powers. The game makes it very clear that the operation you are running is a foreign one, sent in to take over and manage the province because the local government is unable to handle itself. It isn’t unrealistic because war will often force these realities on people but rather that by ignoring that legacy it paints a picture that foreign interests are the saviours. It leaves a fairly glowing review of imperialism in a very unintended way.

I won’t judge too harshly because it is still being developed, but I am fairly cynical of how a game strips away references to the real world when dealing with complex ideas. I don’t think this is intentional, I think this is a side effect of that attempt to reduce an irreducibly complex concept like stabilizing a war zone.

An irreducibly complex problem summed up into three options may lack nuance and sensitivity.

I am hoping that the future will bring a level of sectarianism to it, something that I think is severely lacking and which would not make it too complex to be an enjoyable game. Perhaps that is the flaw of the original platform — it is originally a mobile game, maybe mobiles aren’t able to handle that kind of complexity yet?

It wouldn’t need to depict real world cultural, ethnic, religious and political divides but it would improve the game a lot to make the population less devoid of why many conflicts happen in the first place. Maybe it could address a fraction of the complexity, instead of making it a “good guys are the ones supported by the west” versus the “bad guys who are fighting against the west”.

I believe the scope of the game is the true limiting factor at play — that the style of game that they have gone for and the amount they can do with a mobile game engine may be the true limit on what level of complexity they can aim for. I do have hope however that they might be able to bridge the gap a little more — not so much that they make the game unplayable but enough that the kinds of lessons they want to inspire aren’t so watered down that they become mildly troubling.

No-one really wants to weigh up the risk of sending troops into a province as a calculation between fighting the bad guys or they engage in war crimes, but the half-measure they have in the game now doesn’t really represent the systemic issues.

Maybe my problem is that they don’t see the issues themselves as being systemic, maybe the game is too liberal for me? Maybe I’m too radical? I mean, yeah, but hopefully when the game gets more dev-work done it won’t feel like it is white-washing the darkest aspects of modern warfare to me.

Hopefully.