Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes

I love BSG and I want to love this game but the bottom line is this: The two minutes of RTS play just isn't worth the 20 minutes of clicking through dialogue and transition screens. I get the management aspect and I like that part. The Crisis/Opportunity is somewhat annoying but I get what they are trying to do and it feels very BSG. What slows the game down at every turn seems to be another character saying, "Captain we need you" so they can repeat something the player cares nothing about. What should be a fun, fast-moving playthrough turns into a burdensome "You must read the story" game. I enjoy balancing the ship and resource economy and the the idea of earning points so you can benefit from a future playthrough makes me what to play again. HOWEVER the cost of replaying means sitting and waiting on endless dialogue screen and I am not willing to pay that price. Again I want to love this game. If they could get rid of that one feature and allow me to be in control of the temp and do a playthrough in an hour this would be one of my go-to games to play once a day. As is stands right now the game drives me crazy. I just click click click click click trying to get to the good parts.

Is the game ok? Yes, if you just want to waste some time and you do not mind having your time wasted. There are a few design decisions that would make it an excellent gacha. Which makes it not ok, and I would wait for a redesign before purchasing if you are really itching for a roguelite. 1. Crisis flood. Some runs just get destroyed by randomness. You get piled and have NO CHANCE at all to actually play the game or feel like you have any semblance of control. Due to the crisis volume it could be an auto clicker from forced discussion to forced discussion. (Which then drain your resources and you die) 2. Dodgers are a terrible design. You just cannot have AOE in each run because you are not provided the option. So you die. Its not skill or ability of choice. The game just decided this is as far as you go. Because of the above two points its not a good "let off some steam" game. But it also makes sitting down for longer times feel unrewarding when you get destroyed without being able to mount any resistance. Even if you succeed it is just luck then, cause you could do nothing about the loss either so it was not on you when you win. Is the game ok? Sure. Not terrible. Is it genuinely wholeheartedly recommended? Nah.

First couple of playthroughs/runs was really fun and engaging. The story is cool and all events interesting. Problem with this game is that it's so very repetitive and quite simplistic. Each run takes 1-2 hours, and then it's game over. After a few runs, you have seen it all, so you just right click to skip ALL the dialog and everything boils down to simple binary choices which pops all the time ("gain one food or heal one character"). Nothing changes between runs as well, so there is nothing new to see. What I'm saying is that the game quickly looses all BSG flair and turns into pure mechanics. And unfortunately the mechanics are frustrating simple and the game seems balanced so it's impossible to get steam rolling with your "deck", so you are always at the mercy of the RNG for legendary skills. So each run is a slog fest of trying to stay alive. Yeah, I get that's the gist of BSG and maybe I don't went that in a game that you are supposed to play through like 15 times. It's just ends up being frustrating. Also, the "cylon amongst us" questline pops up in every line. It's impossible to solve until after 3 turns, after which it pretty much solves itself. So I think they botched this and it would need more complex mechanics and a more sprawling storyline.

tl;dr: the devs' care and attention to detail is evident, and this is a Great Game, For a game that is so committed to RNG, it's remarkably well balanced. And it's frakking beautiful: both as a tactical challenge that constantly keeps you on your heels, and in its UX design. But the unrelenting RNG makes it hard to narrate a story of earned progress, and that's immersion-breaking. Instead of providing a coherent story that could entertain when told, I get a fever dream wherein I pick the least-useless level-up perk. Fate, it seems, is just a number you can use to make re-runs easier. Case in point, from my last run: My scrappy fleet is closing in on the Galactica's homing signal. One more jump, and we're free of this nightmare. 33 seconds away from rest. It's been... a journey. I wanted to believe that we could reconcile with the Cylons, even after the genocide. But every time we encounter one of their philosophers or priests, they just offer a few words of schoolyard rationale for their divine righteousness, as cover for launching a nuke towards the remnants of humankind. My X.O, Jackson (Youssef when we're off duty) had been climbing the ranks, earning his stripes many times over. So when he asked cautiously if the fleet could spend scarce time and resources investigating an old myth, something from his childhood... I thought that this frivolous and dangerous escapade would be worth it. Else what are we surviving *for*? Sector after sector, we searched floating wrecks and long-barren planets. Life carried on: we dealt with scurvy aboard our mining vessel; we defused innumerable crises; and in doing so we discovered that there was at a Cylon in our fleet, masquerading as crew. X.O. Jackson finally found something on a passing planet that pointed towards his goal. But my spies found something too: Jackson was the Cylon. A frakking toaster. We'd been played. I'd trusted him... it. I was not worthy to shepherd this fleet. Turns out, nobody was as surprised as he was. Or as horrified. He proved his humanity in so many ways, and those scars look very human to my eye. He never did find what he was looking for, and likely never will. But maybe once we rejoin the fleet... One more jump, and I'm glad to have this Cylon -- Youssef, my friend -- by my side, the gods be damned. One. More. Jump. --- ...okay so cool, there's great narrative in there if you work on it, but the RNG is basic: It doesn't consider whether there's a narrative arc emerging from the dice rolls that it could lean into. A decent Dungeon Master lets the dice decide the outcome of a situation, but curates that to make the character more interesting. BSG:SH just rolls a die and gives you whatever -- here's three squadron-oriented level-up perks for your weapons-specialist X.O., pick a frustratingly-useless whatever. Makes me crave a basic, deterministic skill tree. Mechanically: After a handful of runs I love how balanced this is. Everything is frakking hard: you only get least-worst choices, and battles ramp up from initially being strategic to a crescendo of just reacting fast enough to get out with any skin left. But it always feels like there's a least-worst path if you can just get a handle on the odds. It's not fun. It's really fun. The art: It's great, it's messy. There's 3D models next to hand-drawn portraits, next to pixel-art environments. All smushed together. Individually, it's excellent, particularly the pixel art. But smushed together, it's like there were three talented art directors who had very different ideas about how this game should look, and they reconciled by just agreeing to never talk. Strongly recommend. This is a gem. Will update this review after the next jump -- only one more Cylon basestar between us and Home. Peace.

НЕ ТРАТЬТЕ НА ЭТО ДЕНЬГИ И ВРЕМЯ! Игра унылая. Ни космических баталий как показано в ролике ни тактики ни стратегии ни чего нет. Из 3D - только предварительно записанный демо-ролик. Игра представляет собой унылый антикризисный менеджер который стоит перед выбором между плохо и очень плохо. Все что вам нужно делать в игре - фармить ресурсы и использовать их для решения кризисов. Которые возникают (как ни странно) строго по расписанию. После кризиса - вас ждет новый кризис - битва с сайлонами на 2D доске.. И так бесконечно. У этой игры нет смысла и нет цели. Играть на среднем уровне сложности - это верный проигрыш. Унылое разочарование. Верните потраченные мои деньги. Если мой отзыв был для вас полезным или вы согласны - ставьте лайк. Если нет - дизлайк.

Ich gebe diesem Spiel im aktuellen Zustand eine negative Bewertung, weil es schlicht und ergreifend unfair ist. Ich habe überhaupt nichts gegen schwere Spiele und es darf auch sehr gerne herausfordernd sein - aber nicht unfair. Und das ist dieses Spiel. Selbst auf dem leichten Schwierigkeitsgrad mit Boni verreckt man in einer Tour. Das kann gerne auf Mittel oder schwer so sein, wenn man die Herausforderung sucht, aber das Wort "leicht" sollte genau das bedeuten und das tut es nicht im Entferntesten. Sobald man mit einer Fraktion nur den "angespannt" Status hat, eskaliert es an allen Ecken und Enden. Das hat dann auch nichts mehr mit Realismus oder Immersion zu tun. Das Fraktionssystem muss DRINGEND überarbeitet werden.

My first reaction was "Oh no, this looks like a bad mobile port, oh no", but I'm so glad I gave this game a chance. It is so deep and interesting beyond what it seems. It is basically an adaptation of the FFG board game (A favorite of mine) without it being directly an adaptation of that board game....if you play both, you'll get where I'm coming from. Its deep and so well set up for a Rogue-lite, probably my favorite of the genre but that might be down to me being a BSG fangirl since way back. The basic game is like this: You start with a 'fleet' of ships, your Gunstar and two Civilian ships of various types randomized along with everything else. You have a starting crew, also random, and others that will join you along the way. As you play, random events...mostly bad but sometimes good...pop up and you have to use your head and resources to ge through them. At some point, a sub-game starts where you have to investigate your people as one of them may be a Cylon agent. The absolute coolest part about this, I will not spoil, but it is rather true to the show. You never know who it could be because everything is fresh and random when you start a new run. Even the Cylons that are chasing after you, each one of them is unique and has a ton of personality. The game itself is pretty unforgiving, after each run you get some points to spend on things to make the next run easier...typical Rogue Lite stuff there, but the tension and pain never really lets up even with a lot of stuff spent. The runs aren't that long, depending on how things go, so you can hop in and plan for a quick BSG break and not feel like you have to set aside an afternoon to it. The Combat is rather basic, but with enough going on it can get your heart pumping....but tbh it never really 'shines' like BSG deadlock did....and that's fine, this one's point is narrative over all. I do have one complaint about a combat-related thing, but its a spoiler so I'll keep that to myself...just, how they have a thing at the end set up doesn't make certain 'combat happenings' make much sense. Anyway: If you are a BSG fan, deffo give this a go. If you're not a BSG fan, this is a great way to get introduced to the world without it being direct and spoilery. I'm not sure if someone who isn't a fan of the franchise would like it all that much, but maybe? Give it a go, 2 hours is more than enough time to get a run or two in and know.

Game tries to do a lot of things but just doesn't really do them that well. There's a ton of different little mechanics, but all of them are boring. There's a Cylon spy finding minigame that is more-or-less random guessing. The combat is a series of RNG checks that determine if you lose before the battle even starts rather than requiring real strategy. There were no battles where I couldn't tell if I was screwed immediately upon looking at the enemy's innate specials. Events are tedious resource sinks. You're supposed to balance different fleet factions but this is also mostly RNG, since how much influence you gain/lose is obfuscated, and the events are random "Either screw faction A or screw faction B" situations. Runs are much too long and the content is repetitive and uninteresting.

Acceptable core gameplay held back by a lack of interesting story and too much repitition. The developer's previous work, Crying Suns -despite my complaints about its ending- had a captivating story that pushed you forward. You wanted to see what the answer behind the mystery of the great shutdown, and that kept you going. Here there's barely any of that. The mystery of who's a Cylon, so keen in the show, doesn't feel significant when the characters are new each run. The meta story shared between runs is just a few lines long, featuring characters we don't know. The story doesn't keep me playing... ...and neither does the gameplay, which gets same-y pretty quickly. The short-range ships go back and forth. The long range ships sit in place. The battlestar guns clean up stragglers. Let's do that 15 more times this run! The crises, while faithful in concept to the original show, just feel like straightforward resource management exercises. The workers' strike in the show was tense because time was spent showing the conditions, the Chief getting in there and seeing that despite the fleet's dire situation, conditions were still too far gone even for emergency work, and in resolving that it was time for a strike. That makes the crisis feel like a crisis, a choice between two harsh alternatives. A text message saying "Workers say conditions are bad. They want 5 scrap. Pay?" doesn't really feel like anything, not even with the :( face beside it. So, manage some resources for a while, until you get the same story ending cutscene, same as every run. You might unlock a new ship that's actually not quite exactly the same as the previous one but it pretty much is.