What can I say other than holy crap. I’m a diehard fan of the Reimagined Battlestar Galatica and hearing the one or two browser/phone games based on it never intrigued me enough to ever try them, game mods (ex: Homeworld 2: BSG Fleet Commander) were the closest thing we were ever going to get. Then I hear about this one and try it and again I say holy crap.

This is the proper BSG game we’ve been wishing for. Playing this makes me wish a dev would come along and make a proper FPS version of this. Board ships, fly fighters, etc. Don’t want it to be an MMO but multiplayer would be nice.

Typical combat.

I’m digressing, I apologize. Anyways, to the review.

Speaking of Homeworld, if you’ve ever played that game series you’ll be right at home, except this one is turn based of course. Being “slower” than real time you get to choose what, where, when, and how a unit attacks at the end of turns. Ship is going to die? Have it ram into an enemy unit and hopefully take it with you. Yes, you can ram, friendly fire happens by accident most the time. It will do a red outline of the units that are going to hit but it might not show up if they’re passing by each other. I’ve not had too many friendly fires (only two so far, both times both ships were lost) and that was strictly because I didn’t pay attention to where they were passing by. One slight touch and they’re gone but they were small and cheap to replace/I had a save before the battle so just did the battle over again.

The single player is very well done. Total map control with income stats, unlocks, and build queues along with officers. Officers take control of fleets in which they can give slight buffs to said fleet and/or to the flagship (the physical ship they’re on) as well as being able to command more ships in that fleet. Each officer has to rank up in order to be able to handle more ships but you cannot have more than 7 ships in a fleet. The “fleet” you start out with is all that is left of Colonial Fleet as there headquarters was destroyed in a Cylon attack along with all fleet commanders. Daidalos (Pronounced: Day-duh-lus if you’re unsure) is a jump-able shipyard which is commanded by Admiral Lucinda Cain (as of now we’re unsure who exactly she is in relation to Helena Cain from the TV show, but as I’ve read a suggestion she might be an aunt or grandmother, Link) and she is now leading the scattered fleet with the help of you, her subordinate, a Commander of the Colonial Fleet. In other words, she gives you orders, you carry them out along with other names you will recognize from the TV show, granted it’s most likely there parents/grandparents.

You get all of the Twelve Colonies to defend and have to jump around the map saving planets from defecting from the Quorum because of the Cylons. The Quorum, which has just recently been enacted, is a treaty between all the planets to work together to fight the Cylons. Before the war started, all the Colonies didn’t work together and had there own fleet and were constantly fight each other over who knows what but now with the Cylon threat and no one fleet able to deal with it, the Quorum was enacted, along with the Articles of Colonization, which when a planet signs it, they send supplies (Tylium in game) to supply the fleet to protect there planet. As well (story wise) when the Articles are signed, each planet gets there own Jupiter Class Battlestar (Galactica being the first one) and Daidalos makes them for each planet. Other than the second mission, you don’t get to play with a Jupiter class until later but the classic Artemis class (Original series Galactica ship) you get a few missions down on.

The War Room.

The Quorum in single player (this mechanic does NOT apply in multiplayer) is vital to the game. A minimum of six planets need to be apart of Quorum or it’s disbanded. A planet is very likely to defect if they don’t get protection from a fleet and a Cylon threat is always in orbit. The fleet only counts if that fleet has an Officer. Not every planet needs a fleet but it really does help especially with the Tylium supply you’ll get. If the planet gets defended enough the planet will become “Steadfast” against a threat and won’t defect so easily, giving you time to muster a fleet to defeat the Cylons or even do some side missions for rewards. The Daidalos Fleet is the best to bring a planet up to Steadfast status as it’s already a big threat. Holding a (populated) planet with a fleet also gives you other bonuses. With it fortified by a fleet, depending on the planet you get a bonus such as other fortified planets giving more supplies, cheaper ships to build, cheaper to promote officers, faster cool down on ship jumps or having Cylons take one more turn to jump.

Speaking of combat, starting with the Daidalos station (and the future sight of Ragnar Anchorage as seen in the Mini Series), she cannot move other then where she can jump in. She has two wings of fighters which can seriously help and she has guns but she cannot stand up in a fight. With no shields, only armor in this game, Daidalos has the most health than any ship in the game but has so little armor that she might as well have none. Once it’s gone, all damage done, even by stray missile shots, will very, VERY quickly kill her.
Your ships on the other hand, can maneuver and mitigate the damage they receive. Again, once the armors down, your ships will die quickly so turn those weak sides away. Armor does NOT regenerate and cannot be repaired, once it’s gone, it’s gone the rest of the match. Once you get the hang of this it’ll be easy to handle the fight. I’ve learned to head towards the enemy (this works especially well with Battlestar class ships) and before they have a chance to hit me turn to one side, soak up the damage on one side, once it’s almost gone turn towards them again, let the front armor take the damage, then turn again to the other undamaged side. By the time you get facing forward (unless the enemy has focused said ship) most of the ship will be died or dying so you won’t have to worry so much about losing your beloved battlestar. Problem with that strategy, and indeed a bit of a problem with the game is it/I can’t tell where the front is weapon hitting wise. I mean yes I know the direction of the ships and such but when I’m fighting a ship on my left side and I’m facing them with my left side, why is my front armor going down? If they’re slightly above or below me, shouldn’t the top/bottom armor be taking damage not the front?

Real time replay is a very nice feature. Gives the classic “live camera” style shots.

It is a bit picky about that but it’s usually mitigated by “you’re one ship is targeting my favorite ship, well then my entire fleet is going to target that one ship out of spite.” In that example hopefully you’ll kill enough ship so your favorite ship won’t die so quickly and can run away.
Some tactical advantages are being able to set the posture of the ships. By default everything runs at 100% but you can divert your ships crew to focus on defense or attack. Defensive doesn’t give you an external defense (more armor that is) but it gives your subsystems which are vital to a ships function more of a chance to survive and take damage, detect ship further away, as well as make your marines aboard the ship tougher so they can fight off boarding parties but it takes away from the offensive end of that. While the Offensive end of that spectrum means guns firing faster, more often, and more accurately but the defensive end being weaker and not taking as much damage as default. Both ends of this spectrum significantly decrease the ships speed so I’d suggest with sticking to default, 100% across the board unless otherwise needed.

If you haven’t seen any trailers or “lets plays” of the game, then you need to know that the music is amazing. It is classic (reimagined) Battlestar music. Sadly Bear McCreary doesn’t do the music as he did on the show but the composer that does it for this game, you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking that it was Bear. Classic drums mixed with a bit of electric guitar, bit of rock and roll and powerful percussion, again, no one would blame you for mistaking him.
The battles can be replayed in real time and the game gives you the ability to record it to a video which you can replay at the main menu or share to friends and even has an ability to upload to Youtube from within the game.

While I haven’t played any multiplayer, it is 1v1 with no single player elements (meaning no economy or supplies, ship building, etc.) you choose the ships you want, put them together, and fight. You have ranked and casual mode, you can choose a handful of maps to fight on and different game modes including a Co-op mode 2vAI.

Multiplayer setup.

Some minor problems though. The record to video option is very iffy (at least with me and my setup) and a lot of the times doesn’t work at all. The game just sits there saying “Working” and eventually brings up the option to cancel after 5mins. I thought at first it was just me not giving it enough time but for a 2 minutes and 30 second battle, how much time do you need? I tried one time to record it, went for a 15 or so minute walk, came back, and it still wasn’t finished and since it doesn’t give you a progress bar or estimated time you don’t know if it’s working or not. The times it does work, it seems to take no more than a minute or two to complete with no status of “video finished and saved to…” It wasn’t hard to find the save files in my Documents folder but it would be nice for it to tell you were it is. And as well when the video fails to be made, the game continues to run fine but when I exit the game it freezes and won’t close until I force it to.
The options menu is a bit…empty. You get Vsync, quality of textures, unit quality, fullscreen yes no, resolution and that’s it. I guess that’s not a big deal considering there isn’t much to render in the game other than the odd rock but you’d think there would be some more options for things such as wreckage details and such. Of course the standard audio volumes are there, effects, music, and speech, but if music is at the same level as everything else, the music tends to drown out everything else.
And mentioned earlier, the direction of ships and taking damage from that direction is a bit weird. Maybe it’s just me but it seems weird that I’m completely side facing the enemy and taking damage to the front or rear of the ship.

You can choose your ships/station loadout before jumping in.

Later in the campaign, when there are a lot of ships on either side, the game randomly loose frames. I say randomly because sometimes I’ll have a big fleet fight and it’ll drop below 30 fps, then I’ll play again later with the same situation and it’ll run at 60 fps. And when there are a lot of ships, the AI will tend to “think” a bit longer than your use to. Early games it is almost instant then extends to 10-15 seconds later down the line. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if you were allowed to move your ships around and such while waiting but I guess that’s part of the design, you can’t make a move while the other person (AI) is making its move.

Overall this game is fantastic and I see myself playing a lot of it from now on, I needed a proper Battlestar game for a long time and it’s finally here and I recommend it wholeheartedly. Good job Black Lab Games.

I leave you with this timely gif.