izigame.me

TL;DR: It's a step up from Ndemic's first title, Plague Inc., but I wouldn't recommend it unless it's on sale.
Positives

Terrain matters now, and maps/scenarios are different.
Simplified game loop for the better – one new dimension (military) to micromanage, providing some strategy.
No more popping the stupid DNA bubble.

Negatives

The really annoying pop-ups still come up (just less often).
Game design is stale (see below).
Repeated events that you can't automate away and are just annoyingly stressful.
They still haven't fixed a bug which makes it impossible to win (you can't negotiate with the insurgency and the insurgency is now immortal).

Rebel Inc. shares the same flaws as Plague Inc. It has some severe game design issues, which become painfully obvious when you play on Brutal or Mega Brutal:

It's still just Plague Inc. with a coat of paint and some bells and whistles. It still follows probability, resistance, and outcome design.
It's still way too formulaic: get this, get that.
There's no concrete feedback between stability and civic investment; one initiative can flip everything.
The gameplay still feels extremely random rather than strategic.
The reputation system is just as annoyingly unfair as the cure system was in Plague Inc.
The added anti-cheese mechanics are just stupid.

Explanation
1. Plague Inc. follows the design of three areas you can invest in:
- Spread – how easily your disease can spread around the world.
- Resistance – how likely it is for humans to find out about the disease and how hard it is to cure.
- Outcome – how likely they are to die from the disease.
This is pretty much the same in Rebel Inc. but somewhat simplified:
Stability is what you're told your initiatives influence, which then trickles down to eliminating hostiles and converting neutrals into supporters.
2. Because it mostly centers around Plague Inc.'s resource and map design, you don't have many options that do fundamentally different things. It feels more like a checkbox experience rather than an actual in-depth experience.
For instance, I would love for us to focus on:
- Financial victory
- Cultural victory
- Militaristic victory
with each being a stage you can invest in depending on the map and your personal preference for strategizing.
Instead, it's all boiled down to a bland stat booster to the very simple mechanics that exist in the game.
3.
Due to the very simple nature, it can feel completely random when “supporters” decide to support you. You can bombard them with investments and they MIGHT support you, causing a lot of games to be lost due to this absurdly delayed feedback.
4.
A personal pet peeve is that I just don't like a hard resource limiter that punishes strategic thinking. I understand that removing the cure or reputation in both games allows for turtle strategies, but I would counter that at least with Rebel Inc. you could have had so many other avenues to counteract turtle strategies being the go-to approach, whether that be sleeper cells, double agents, or other “enemy from the inside” paranoia mechanics that could topple a beginner relying on turtle strategies.
5.
When Rebel Inc. was released, there were a few cheese strategies you could do. Most of them weren't practical cheese.
One such cheese was that you could endlessly threaten the rebels (as long as they were still holding territory) and thus gain theoretically endless reputation (it gave you 3 reputation each time you did it, while slightly making the rebels stronger).
Now, however, after you threaten them enough, the game will start to magically convert supporters into hostiles at a rapid pace (to a comedic degree), despite the fact that this is only a cheese strat you can do once you've already stabilized the insurgency.
At the end of the day, I'm fine with no cheese strats as long as the remedy isn't absurdly tilted in the opposite direction (i.e., not doing the Paradox Interactive approach of game balance).
Conclusion
In the end, it's a game I play from time to time, but every time I return, it leaves more bitterness than fondness.
The same can be said about Plague Inc. to an even greater degree of bitterness, but you can at least excuse it for being mostly a copy of the original Flash game and for being Ndemic's first game. However, given their latest title is coming soon, I'm not holding out any hope for it.