Rebel Galaxy Steam In Home Streaming Review

Hey guys, The Gaming Wiz here with another Steam In Home Streaming review. We put the recently released space exploration RPG game, Rebel Galaxy, from indie studio Double Damage.

Before we head on to the review, you may want to read up on our testing methodology and all the system specs. The highlights include the main host PC, Core i7 6700K, an EVGA Superclocked Geforce 980 4GB with the ACX 2.0 cooler and 32GB Ripjaws DDR4 2400MHz RAM. Intel NIC. Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit. The Surface Pro 3 is the i5 model and the Razer Blade is the 2014 model. And the NUC is D34010WYK, with a Core i3-4010U, 8GB RAM. Finally, everything is connected to an ASUS RT AC87U Router. Once again, read the detailed specs here.

So, on to the tests!

Surface Pro 3 10 Feet, 5GHz, Wi Fi AC, “Balanced” Setting:

One thing that I immediately noticed while starting up Rebel Galaxy with the controller (the game actually does recommend this) is that the launcher has no controller prompts. This may seem counter intuitive as the Surface Pro 3 does not have a keyboard by default (I didn’t purchase the type cover) and you have to fumble around the controller buttons (hint: it’s the A button).
Once I got into the game, the stream looked okay. The image as a whole looked less sharp than the original and the colors were less vibrant. Plus, you had the usual less detailed textures as is the case while playing via Steam In Home Streaming. Sound was also good with no hint of choppiness or distortion. Gameplay was surprisingly very smooth as I couldn’t tell I was playing via in home streaming except for one hiccup as I entered warp speed. Since Rebel Galaxy is not a twitch based game, the controller worked very good while streaming, Other than that I guess there isn’t much to say expect that everything went without a hiccup.

Surface Pro 3 45 Feet, 5GHz, Wi Fi AC, “Balanced” Setting:

At 45 feet, I did have issues connecting to the game. One time it blacked out on startup. And another time the Surface Pro 3 refused to connect to the host PC. But this is not a fault of Rebel Galaxy but rather Steam and my particular Wi Fi setup. I had a good solid gameplay experience as I didn’t notice any input lag but there were a couple of stutters here and there. Not once did I lose connectivity or did the game crash with the latest patches.

Razer Blade 10 Feet, 5GHz, Wi Fi AC, “Balanced” Setting:

Immediately upon loading, the Razer Blade’s “4K” screen brought the compression artifacts into the limelight. Although gameplay was really smooth but you can immediately notice the less detailed textures and the muddled and less vibrant image. But it became less noticeable further playing the game, flying around, destroying enemy ships and doing the countless other activities.

One thing I noticed is that the text was a bit too fuzzy for my tastes and it was hard for me to read, even when the screen was just maybe a feet away for me. Or maybe it’s time to get glasses.

There was a hitch while engaging an enemy frigate, where the screen froze for about a second with the sound looping, like a hard freeze. It fixed itself and then the rest of the gameplay was smooth. Rebel Galaxy froze once again after about 20 mins of playtime while browsing the in game commodities market, and it lasted a bit longer than the previous one.

Oddly, the Razer Blade froze completely while I unplugged the Logitech headset wireless USB dongle. I can’t attribute to the game entirely since it could’ve been easily a driver issue. Had to hard reset the Razer Blade since no amount of Alt+F4’ing or Alt+Tab’ing helped.

Razer Blade 45 Feet, 5GHz, Wi Fi AC, “Balanced” Setting:

This had the same connectivity issues as the Surface Pro 3 at 45 feet. For the first two tries it couldn’t connect to the host PC. This is technically not a problem with the game, but rather the Steam In Home Strwaming protocol itself. I kept getting “couldn’t connect to the remote computer” even though the game launched on the host PC. I had to restart Steam on both devices and turn off Windows firewall on the host PC to finally be able to stream Rebel Galaxy.

Once I did connect, I had an entirely lag and stutter free gaming experience. Though I noticed somewhat choppy sounds occasionally. And the graphics was plagued by more compression issues. Although not too much noticeable on the Surface Pro 3’s screen, but the Razer Blade highlighted these issues considerably more. Other than that the 5GHz Wi Fi AC connection held up well. I had a blast while blasting away enemy ships.

I eventually had a crash to desktop while browsing the commodities market but whether that was due to streaming issues or the game having unforeseen bugs. Later on I found out that is was a bug with the game and the developer has issued a patch to fix this issue.

NUC 1 Gbps, “Balanced” Setting:

You can consider this as a baseline on how the to-be released Steam Link will perform via a hardwired connection. But keep in mind that the Steam Link has obviously less powerful hardware inside.

The NUC is connected to a 55 inch Sony XBR 4K TV. And immediately noticeable on a big screen TV are the compression issues, and the Sony XBR’s 4K up scaling didn’t seem to help. There was a random stutter while warping to a friendly space station. One odd thing I noticed while warping past space clouds and nebula is that they didn’t come up smoothly. As in, there were some slight jitters as the next space cloud came up on screen and flew past me. I didn’t notice this neither in the Surface Pro 3 nor the Razer Blade but it could’ve been that I missed these issues due to the small screen size.

Thankfully, the actual space battle themselves were smooth with no issues.

Apart from that there is not much to report as I had a trouble free gaming experience with Rebel Galaxy.

Verdict:

Rebel Galaxy’s style of gameplay is perfectly suited to Steam In Home Streaming where twitch based skills do not matter. Overall, I had a good experience playing via Steam Streaming with a couple of stutters here and there as expected over Wi Fi. There were no connection drops over hardwired and essentially resulted in a lag free gaming experience, even though the loss of graphical quality is immediately noticeable on a higher resolution or bigger sized screen.