Rebelstar gives a stint of easy fun to the strategist but will not satisfy RPG groupies due to a shallow (linear) story.
For other players, Rebelstar takes place on earth in a near-future time when Aliens have invaded Earth and enslaved humanity. As the story goes, humans of age 30 get captured by the aliens and never return. This has triggered rebellion factions to raise - one of which we are going to follow in this game (mainly) through the eyes of the main character.
The game is played by first watching a dialogue (supposingly letting the story move further), then equipping and deploying your troops, finally by going through the mission itself (where the player and the AI alternatively take turns). In a turn each character is given a number of action points which can be spent in movement (including turning), firing, reloading a weapon, grabbing equipment from the ground, etc. One major aspect of this game is that it supports line-of-sight. Thus you have to get characters to look towards the right direction in order to spot enemies, or fire at them if you had ordered your unit to "overwatch" during your turn. Interestingly, overwatch is triggered according to how many action points you had when you ordered it, versus how many action points your spotted enemy has.
The game has overall fairly enjoyable cartoon-like graphics. If I were to pick the worst details of them, I would mention that they fail to clearly indicate the direction in which your character is looking. But overall they do the trick.
The music is fairly ok but repetitive... up to the boring and after a few missions you will surely find yourself switching it off. Sound effects in turn do the trick but do not leave you breathless.
There are a couple bugs in this game, located in 2-3 specific missions. Thus if you happened not to know how to destroy eggs, look through the FAQ's.
The missions are quite easy and not very numerous (20), so expect not to spend over 20 hours on this game if you are a bit familiar with strategy games. There is no difficulty setting - which unfortunately limits replay value.
These 20 missions still leaves enough time to level up your characters and learn skills. These skills actually allow you to differentiate your various team members (thus you can build up a sniper, an heavy-weapons expert, a few all-purpose units, and a couple of medics too).
Compared to the Fire Emblem games, Rebelstar has a more complex movement and combat system, even though it bears fewer weapons and types of opponents. It also does not develop and differentiate enough characters, both in terms of game play and in terms of roles in the story. The game is also largely simpler and shorter (thus preventing characters from getting enough time to show a personality).
Please note that I did not have the opportunity to test link mode.
Overall, I find the game interesting, but with a "medium quality" feeling to it, essentially linked to the "all too shallow" story. The intermission dialogues are not always clearly linked to the following scenario (as if the game were missing the Fire Emblem "on mission map" dialogues, for instance). Thus I would recommend this game to XCOM fans (if they are prepared not to manage their dear bases and to find a slightly lighter tone to the story) and to strategy fans that do not mind playing a rather easy game from time to time. Let us note that the game is cheap (20$) and thus I would say you get a rather good return on investment here.