Battlestar Galactica’s 2004 revival is one of my favourite TV series. Sure, it’s strange as heck through the final season, and you have to view its tone and creation through the lens of 9/11, the War on Terror, and how that shaped American culture through that decade, but its highest moments really were exceptional – I regularly rewatch the New Caprica escape. Decades later, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes takes that desperate flight that we saw through the first season of the show and uses it as inspiration for an original story that runs alongside.
You take command of a lone Colonial Gunstar, gathering your own little civilian fleet and seeking to find and meet up with the Battlestar Galactica. Of course, much like the Galactica, you will be continually hounded by Cylons finding your location, forcing you to fight a rearguard action while spooling up your FTL drives. Fail to do so? It’s back to the start in this roguelite, to try again with another ship.
These combat sequences are short and sweet, 2-minute defensive missions that make the most eye-catching part of the game. Usually with a Cylon frigate on the opposing corner of the screen to your gunship and a couple of civilian ships, you send out squadrons of fighters and support ships and use your Gunstar’s weapons on cooldown to quickly take out the Cylon fighters that spawn in and the missiles that are fired your way. These play out in real time with pause, so you can stop and adjust, micromanage, and make that perfectly timed jump just as the FTL comes online.
Outside of the Viper fighter, Raptor support ship, and the Cylon Raider and Heavy Raider, there’s a bunch of original creations to add variety to this game. The Viper Mk. 2 is a closer-range ship than the Mk. 7, while the Raptor can come in various configurations for long-range artillery or closer jamming support, and there’s other, faster or more evasive fighters that all have a role to play. The stakes mount up against you through a run, the Cylons spawning in snipers, protective and shielding supports, mine-layers and more. Additionally, the Gunstar or ship opposing you can bring its own battle modifiers, spitting out minefields, hijacking any Colonial missiles that get too close, and more. These only get more imposing when full-sized base stars and a handful of humanoid Cylons appear for the boss battles.
You might overcome the first few sectors with relative ease, but it won’t be long before you’ll need to lick your wounds between encounters. Jumping to a new sector buys you some time before the Cylons reappear, but now you have all the pressures of managing the fleet’s populace, repairing and upgrading, and even hunting down saboteurs.
In addition to raw resources, there’s pips of time to spend and carefully manage between battle. Outside of R&D and squadron repairs and upgrades, almost everything will take time whether it’s repairing critical damage after a ship has taken a few too many hits, gathering resources for nearby planets, wrecks and stations, or dealing with narrative conundrums and full-blown crises. You quickly start to run out of time, just as much as you do Scrap or Tylium Fuel.
I love how these story beats capture the feel of the characters and arcs from the TV series, and also flow around your decisions. Decision points pop up regularly, such as deciding whether the Military is able to lockdown a dock that the Workers need to use, and these boost or diminish the factions, potentially giving you a bonus objective or leading to fallout from the disaffected. This then shapes the kind of redline Crisis that you’ll inevitably face, forcing you to either accept a handicap for a few sectors, or devote time and resources to countering the problem.
This builds into the full revelation that there’s a secret Cylon aboard – shocker! – sabotaging and laying explosives across the fleet. This opens up a new investigation section where you can gather info sector-by-sector, as well as pick up clues and overhear gossip in the bar for you to investigate further. All the while, you’re having to divert resources and use your heroes to defuse bombs that periodically appear.
It’s a tentative balancing act of giving you lots of things to do, and never enough time or opportunity to do them all, always keeping you on the back foot. Even the order in which you perform tasks between battles can be key to success, reserving the single action point each hero has and some POIs, which might be useful for triggering sub-goals of a Crisis.
It’s pretty likely that you won’t make it to Galactica’s fleet on your first try, but that’s what the roguelite metagame is for, letting you accrue Fate on a run that is then spent on a variety of stat buffs and bonus starting resources. You also have a handful of different Gunstar to play with, each with their own particular stats and run objectives that can provide further stat boosts and abilities. One slight shame is that the isometric pixel art scenes don’t change between ships, so the CIC always looks the same, when in the TV series there was a dramatic difference between the old Galactica and the futuristic Pegasus.
I also do feel that there’s maybe not as much staying power here with the roguelite form. A part of that is simply from the fact that a run can take you a few hours, making it feel closer to a full strategy campaign, where action genre roguelites are inherently a bit snappier. However, there’s also some repetition to the crises and ‘story-of-the-week’ problems that play out in each sector. It’s not necessarily in terms of the exact scenarios – though I have seen a good few repeated, most noticeably some of the personal stories – but when it boils down to a choice between bickering factions or the process of weeding out the Cylon in your ranks, it’s definitely familiar after the second time through.
