G-Rebels: A Love Letter To '90s Combat Flight Games

Introduction

My name is Martin Schwiezer, Founder and Creative Director of Reakktor Studios. I've been making games since computers had fewer pixels than today's smartwatches. And somehow I'm still doing this.

Reakktor is a German studio rooted in Hanover. We're a small but battle-hardened team where everyone has at least a decade of game‑dev experience under their belt (which is a polite way of saying we've all seen things no human should ever witness in a production pipeline). Over the decades, we've created 2D platformers like Bermuda Syndrome, MMORPGs such as Neocron and Black Prophecy, an arena FPS dubbed Toxikk, and many more games that kept us busy, caffeinated, and occasionally questioning our life choices.

My first computer was a ZX81. My parents hoped I'd get bored. I didn't. I annoyed them until a C64 showed up, and then I spent the 8‑bit era torturing it with my "programming". Like many kids born in the 70s, I grew up on Alien, Blade Runner, and Star Wars. Basically, the holy trinity of "let's mess up a kid's sense of reality forever!". I wasn't just fascinated by the movies, but by the idea that actual human beings got paid to invent these worlds. That sounded like the ultimate cheat code for life. A career where you could stay a child forever and call it vision.

So, when the 16‑bit home‑computer era arrived, something clicked. I suddenly realized, "Wait... I could actually create stuff!" I talked to some like‑minded classmates, and we founded a dev team like other kids start a garage band. A few years later, we released our first games for the Commodore AMIGA (Cyberzerk and Subtrade). While the others eventually moved on to careers with actual stability, I stuck to my vision. New devs jumped aboard, the studio rebranded to Reakktor in the late 90s, and we're still chasing that VHS‑fueled dream of building worlds, instead of growing up.

Inspiration & Gameplay

At its core, G‑Rebels is a love letter to dystopian sci‑fi. The game is set in 2684. Catastrophic events have almost completely flooded Earth. Humanity survives in newly built, vast floating megacities that compete brutally for the last remaining natural resources. You're part of an elite unit serving your faction, the most powerful city‑state, flying a heavily armed prototype aircraft (Skyblade) across dense urban canyons, storm‑weathered islands, and remote outposts scattered across a drowned world. On paper, your job is straightforward: protect trade routes, keep criminal factions in check, and defend critical infrastructure so that your faction can stay alive.

Even though there's a big good‑versus‑evil conflict looming over everything, the campaign isn't just about world‑shaking events. It's about the people on both sides of the factions. The ones you meet throughout the campaign, the ones who make the world feel messy, human, and anything but black‑and‑white. Not every good guy is actually honest, and not every bad guy is a villain. We hope players connect with these more personal layers of the story, because the classic good‑vs‑evil framing feels a bit worn.

And yes, having said all that, there are absolutely huge battles. As for gameplay inspirations, G‑Rebels has its roots in those gloriously 90s combat‑flight games (HardWar, Terminal Velocity, Fury, etc.). The kind where you felt like a hero even though the draw distance was about twelve meters. And of course, the big one is printed right on our sleeve: G‑Police on PS1. That feeling of weaving between skyscrapers in a futuristic city, being half‑cop, half‑combat pilot, and 100% convinced you were starring in your own sci‑fi movie.

G‑Rebels is very consciously a spiritual successor to that vibe, but rebuilt for a modern audience: an open world with true free exploration, deeper simulation, and many fancy features we desperately wished we had back in the 90s.

Optimization Challenges

Since G‑Rebels is built on Unreal Engine 5, we've had our fair share of challenges. UE only really started dipping its toes into open‑world development with version 5, and even then, it was more "careful experiment" than "fully mature toolset". But in typical Epic fashion, the engine has evolved at an absurd pace. Three or four years ago, half of what UE5 now offers out of the box would've sounded like wishful thinking. World Partitioning, Lumen, and Nanite are the reasons projects of this scale have become achievable for small teams in the first place.

That said, you still have to be careful not to treat the tech as magic. UE5 does a lot of the heavy lifting, but it won't save you from yourself. Manual optimization is going to remain a very real part of working with the engine for a long time.

In detail: the 12,000 km² world of G‑Rebels is essentially a giant streaming mosaic, broken into cells and data layers that stream in and out depending on where you are and how high you're flying. Even with Nanite, we still rely on classic LOD systems for many objects, especially moving aircraft. Far away, they collapse down to a single simplified representation (particle), but as you close in, they transition into fully simulated 3D actors with all their systems active. And the megacities are packed with dense, restless air traffic.

One thing worth highlighting here is that there are no decorative elements in the air traffic. Nothing is fake. When the player spawns, they're immediately surrounded by a living, breathing world with tens of thousands of flying objects. Every Skyblade you see on the horizon, every tiny point of light in the sky, is a real actor with full properties. You can approach it, scan it, attack it, loot it, or just watch it go about its business.

Tools & Team Structure

More than 90% of the visual world is hand‑built, not only by our small core team, but also by a group of commissioned artists who help us shape the scale and detail the project demands. We use procedural tools mainly for vegetation on the islands (small bushes, grass, repeating natural patterns) and for a few other systemic elements. The voices in the game are a mix of licensed AI‑generated voices and real narrators. Having access to procedural tools is one of the reasons small teams like ours can even attempt projects of this size today.

In total, including all contributing artists, the team sits at around twelve people plus marketing staff. But when it comes to the actual day‑to‑day development, the open‑heart surgery of building G-Rebels is handled by just four devs. In that sense, there's still a very real comparison to that garage band. Working like this is both a blessing and a curse: incredibly flexible, personal, and efficient, and occasionally incredibly exhausting. Honestly, we could fill an entire interview just talking about that part alone.

Choosing Single-Player Over Multiplayer

Having built two MMOs and an AFPS, we pretty much know what it takes to turn a concept like this into a functioning multiplayer game. We love multiplayer, we really do, but we also respect the sheer amount of work behind it. It's not something you just "add on the side". First and foremost, G‑Rebels is a single‑player experience, built around its campaign and open‑world exploration.

If we tried to ship a full multiplayer mode alongside it, we'd either have to cut back the scope of the simulation and story, or we'd end up releasing it somewhere around 2035. Right now, we'd rather pour our resources into enemy behaviour, handcrafted missions, VR support, and a strong single‑player progression than into lobbies, matchmaking, and anti‑cheat systems.

There's also a bit of genre nostalgia at play: G‑Rebels is a spiritual successor to those late‑90s/early‑2000s single‑player combat‑flight games. We want you to have that "it's just me, my ship, and this insane city in front of me" feeling again, without someone screaming in voice chat while you’re trying to take in the environment. If we ever decide to add a multiplayer component in the future, it'll only be because the community genuinely wants it and because we have the resources to do it properly. Anything else just wouldn't make sense.

Marketing Strategy & Approach

Our main focus is PC and core players, which is why Steam is our central hub. We run closed playtests, time‑limited demos, and soon Early Access. All with one goal: getting real data and feedback long before we hit full release. The July demo on Steam and at events like Gamescom was deliberately built to stress‑test the fundamentals: flight model, UI, performance, and overall feel. Players were funneled straight into our Discord and forums so we could iterate quickly and keep the feedback loop tight.

Early Access itself is framed as a test flight: we start with a curated mission set, open‑world content, VR support, and performance upgrades, and then refine the experience together with the community. Our strategy is simple: get people into the cockpit as early as possible, listen closely, and let the world, the ship, and that nostalgic‑but‑modern vibe do most of the marketing for us.

Right now, G‑Rebels is very clearly positioned as a PC title, with Steam as its main home. We're launching on Steam Early Access because that's where our core audience is and where we can iterate the fastest. It gives us the room to properly tune performance, VR support, and balancing together with the community before we dare to call it 1.0.

In addition to Steam, we're also bringing G‑Rebels to the Epic Games Store, giving PC players the freedom to choose the platform they prefer. We want to deliver a solid experience on both stores and make sure the game feels great no matter where you pick it up.

Reakktor Studios

Interview conducted by 80 Level