G-Rebels just hit Steam Early Access on July 20, 2026, and I’ve been flying around in it all week.
If you don’t know what it is, here’s the short version. It’s a combat flight sim set in the year 2684, after the oceans swallowed most of the planet.
You pilot a glider called a Skyblade and take on jobs across a giant open world of floating cities. It’s from Reakktor, and a lot of people are calling it the spiritual successor to the old PS1 game G-Police.
Here’s the thing though. The tutorial doesn’t hold your hand very well, and the game is still rough in spots because it’s Early Access.
So think of your first few hours like learning to drive a fast car in a city you’ve never been to. You don’t start by street racing. You figure out the pedals, learn a few streets, and build up from there.
That’s the whole approach here. Get comfortable first, then go looking for trouble.
Figure out scanning before you do anything else
This is the number one thing that trips people up, so I’m putting it first.
Early on the game asks you to scan civilian Skyblades, and it barely explains how. Tons of players get stuck right here and think the game is broken.
It isn’t. You just fly up close to the target and press the middle mouse button to scan.
The trick is you have to actually get near them. Hang back too far and nothing happens, and you sit there wondering what you did wrong.
Get close, tap middle mouse, done.
The developers already know this part confuses people and have said they want to make it clearer. Until they do, just remember it and you’ll skip the frustration everyone else is posting about.
Fix your settings before your first real flight
There’s a known bug where vsync won’t stay turned on. You flip it on in the menu, it looks fine, then it quietly reverts to off.
The result is screen tearing, which looks like the top and bottom of your screen are slightly out of sync during fast turns.
If you see that, don’t assume your PC is the problem.
The workaround right now is editing the config files directly to lock vsync on. It’s a little annoying, but it’s a five minute fix and then you never think about it again.
Do this before you get invested in a long mission. A tearing screen during a dogfight is the fastest way to hate a game that you’d otherwise like.
Pick a control setup and stop fiddling with it
G-Rebels supports a bunch of ways to fly. You’ve got mouse and keyboard, a regular gamepad, full HOTAS setups, and even experimental HOSAS if you own two sticks.
Here’s my honest take for a beginner.
You don’t need the fancy hardware. The controls are genuinely easy to pick up, and plenty of people fly perfectly well on mouse and keyboard or a basic controller.
The flying is smooth enough that you can skim under a street overpass without much practice. So don’t let anyone tell you that you need a three hundred dollar flight stick to enjoy this.
Use whatever you already own and get flying.
If you fall in love with the game later and want to buy a stick, great. But that’s a reward for sticking with it, not a requirement to start.
Don’t expect a hardcore flight sim
This one is about setting your expectations correctly, because it changes how much fun you have.
The Skyblade doesn’t fly like a fighter jet. There’s no real weight or momentum to it.
You can hover in place, stop instantly, and move in any direction without the physics fighting you. Veteran flight sim players have knocked it for feeling a bit light and floaty.
Is that a dealbreaker?
Not for most people. If you go in expecting a realistic military sim you’ll be annoyed, but if you treat it like a fast arcade game where you can throw the ship around freely, it clicks.
Go back to the car analogy. This isn’t a stiff track car that punishes every mistake. It’s more like a go-kart that does exactly what you tell it, so lean into that and have fun with the freedom.
The good news is the developers have said flight physics is their main focus during the six month Early Access window, so it should keep getting better.
Make money with the right side jobs
Everything in this game runs on credits, and you’ll want a steady supply early.
The early missions lean heavy on escort and waypoint jobs, which get repetitive fast. You’ll fly someone from A to B, then do it again, then again.
Those pay, but they’re a grind. The more interesting money is in the side work.
You can do bounty hunting, mining, racing, mercenary contracts, piracy, and artifact hunting to fill your wallet. Mix these in so you’re not just flying escort loops until your eyes glaze over.
Chase the jobs that sound fun to you, not just the ones the story shoves at you first.
The open world is full of outposts, factories, and research facilities to poke around. A lot of the good credits come from just exploring and taking on whatever you stumble into.
Spend your first credits on engines and speed
Once you’ve got some money, the question is what to buy. You can upgrade engines, weapons, shields, drones, missiles, and stealth systems.
My advice for a new pilot is simple. Buy speed first.
Your Skyblade starts around 700 km/h, and with engine upgrades you can push it past 2,000 km/h. That’s not a small bump, that’s nearly tripling how fast you get around.
A faster ship means shorter trips between jobs, easier escapes when a fight goes bad, and less time staring at empty sky.
There’s also quick travel that hits mach 5 or 6 for crossing the map. In a world that’s over 12,000 square kilometers with no loading screens, being fast is worth more than almost anything else early on.
One heads up on the boost. Right now you can lean on it a lot, but the devs have said the full version will make boost a limited, tactical resource.
So get in the habit now of saving boost for when you actually need it, like closing a gap on a target or breaking off a losing fight. You’ll thank yourself when the change lands.
Fight the way the game wants you to fight
The combat is one of the parts G-Rebels does well, so it’s worth learning properly.
You’ve got two main tools. Close-range cannons and guided missiles.
The cannons are for knife fights. Get in close, keep the enemy in front of you, and pour it on.
The missiles are for range, so use them to soften up a target or hit something you can’t easily line up a gun run on.
A good rhythm is missiles to open, cannons to finish.
Because your ship can stop and turn on a dime, you can play combat pretty aggressively. Don’t be afraid to slam to a halt, spin toward whoever’s shooting you, and put them in your sights.
Use the open world instead of grinding in circles
Last thing, and it ties everything together.
The map here is huge and there are no loading screens, which means the whole world is one continuous space you can wander.
New players tend to camp near the starting area doing the same jobs over and over. Don’t do that.
Fly out. Find new outposts, race through the cities, chase an artifact rumor, or just enjoy the weather and the day-night cycle while you scout for work.
The game gets a lot better the moment you stop treating it like a checklist and start treating it like a place to explore.
Remember it’s Early Access, so it’s going to have rough edges for a while. The flight model is getting reworked, some missions repeat, and a few settings are buggy.
But the bones are good, the flying is fun once you relax into it, and there’s a whole flooded world out there waiting for you to go poke at it.
–
Images are from the G-Rebels page on Steam and used under Fair Use.