Rebelstar: Tactical Command

Rebelstar: Tactical Command is a 2005 turn-based tactics game for the Game Boy Advance, designed by Julian and Nick Gollop at Codo Technologies and published by Namco. It takes its name from Rebelstar, one of Julian Gollop's earliest games, from the 1980s. In a near future where aliens rule the Earth, small squads of human rebels fight back.

The campaign is a series of missions on hand-made maps with destructible terrain. Soldiers spend action points to move, crouch and shoot, and they gain skills as the campaign goes on. A skirmish mode and a two-player mode on one console are also included.

It is the X-COM designer making a pocket version of his own game, and the handheld limits suit the design: small squads, small maps, short missions. Reviewers at the time praised its depth for the platform.

There is no strategic layer of the X-COM kind, and the story is aimed at a younger audience than X-COM was. It was never re-released, so playing it now means owning the cartridge.

Rebelstar keeps X-COM's battles, aliens and all, and drops its strategic campaign. It is worth knowing as a link in the Gollop line: Rebelstar in the 1980s, Laser Squad, X-COM, this game, and Phoenix Point. Each one reworks the same core ideas.