Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes by developer Alt Shift and published by Dotemu—PC (Steam) review written by Hayden with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Battlestar Galactica in all its incarnations has been part of the bedrock of Western science fiction for nearly half a century. Alt Shift’s newest entry Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes aims to capture the franchise’s feeling of courage in the face of relentless pursuit and overwhelming odds, and it does it well. While placing the player in command of a Gunstar (think mini-Battlestar) that has more limited resources and capabilities than the titular ship of the show, it balances that against foes appropriate for the scaling to good effect. As you try to hold off waves of attackers long enough for your handful of ships to escape, the game has you counting down the seconds until you can jump to safety, while trying to make sure that you don’t leave anyone behind.
Graphically, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes draws on the aesthetics of the 2004 reimagining of the franchise, with the vaguely horseshoe-shaped Cylon Raiders leading the charge to try to end your little chunk of humanity. Battles have ships and weapons fully animated, while between-battle scenes use a vignette style of art as you navigate around. From thruster flares to nebula clouds and slowly rotating planets, down to onboard fires and dozens of unique character portraits, Alt Shift have picked out the essential pieces of the franchise to make Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes feel alive.
Gameplay in Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes separates in two main areas: real time (pausable) combat, and fleet management. The player’s overall goal is to survive long enough that their handful of ships can regain the Battlestar Galactica and its main fleet - to do that, however, requires balancing combat performance actively destroying incoming ships with non-combat decisions that determine what resources are available at a given time. When combat starts, you’ll find yourself watching the timer count down until you can jump away from the numerically superior enemy. When you’re in between combats, you’ll be trying to figure out the best way to use your limited time and resources to repair and improve before the next combat round find you again. Oh, and you’ll be trying to balance relations with political factions within the fleet, responding to emerging crisis points, and trying to balance whether paying the costs to resolve an issue today is worth the opportunity costs of forgoing an upgrade or taking a penalty for a few jumps.
Within the combat sequences of Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, the player’s Gunstar is always anchored in the bottom left of the screen, and the Cylon capital ship anchoring the attack is always in the top right. Accompanying your Gunstar will be two of your half dozen civilian support ships, and between your Gunstar’s onboard weapons and up to three units of combat craft you need to keep everyone alive. A central trope of the franchise is that the attacking Cylons will overwhelm the defenders given enough time, so all combats have a timer counting down. When it completes after a few minutes, your fleet can jump away for another short stint of safety. But wait, there’s more! Your combat craft (fighters, etc.) can’t jump, so you need to get them back on board before you leave, and while you do that they aren’t shooting down enemy craft or intercepting missiles. You do have some weapons on the Gunstar to help, but these aren’t generally constantly active or able to cover everywhere at once, so you have to choose when and where to deploy them for best effect.
Overall, the combat sequences in Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes feel very well tuned to creating a sense of urgency that creeps up on you. In any given one-on-one matchup, your combat craft will generally be able to deal with an opposing Cylon unit with minimal difficulty. Of course, those Cylon units are rarely alone, and the area in which they can approach your fleet to attack your Gunstar or the civilian ships is large enough that you will rarely feel that you have every angle covered. And then they start coming in bigger groups with support vessels that hang back to shoot while you deal with the closest ones first. And then the capital ship starts firing missiles that need to be intercepted. Now your jump timer is about to go off and its POP QUIZ, HOTSHOT - you’ve got two squadrons of your best pilots still fighting in space that will be destroyed if you leave them behind and half a dozen enemy units and a missile coming that will hit your ships if you stick around long enough to dock your fighters. WHAT DO YOU DO?
The moment you jump away, the entire pace of Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes changes. There is no timer, not real-time action that needs to be dealt with. Your panic and adrenaline can subside, and instead you are confronted with the other half of the game - fleet management. Every system you jump into will have a number of points of interest that can be explored or exploited for resources, crisis and decisions that affect your ships, and a limited number of turns available to do them in. You can take your time deciding, however, as there isn’t anything forcing your hand during this phase at least. Also available during this phase is the ability to upgrade your ships, configure and improve your combat craft, buy and sell from traveling traders or isolated stations you encounter, and have conversations with your command staff and trusted people in the fleet. This is also when your civilian ships become more than just dead weight to be protected, as they generate the supplies and material needed to repair and upgrade.
All is rarely well in your little fleet, however from breakdowns on ships never meant to be away from maintenance this long to conflicts among the various factions of people in your fleet, there’s almost always something to grab your attention. Should an empty cargo bay be turned over to your pilots and marines for R&R after risking their lives fighting the Cylons, or should the space be turned into a makeshift hospital to help keep everyone healthy? Should you divert resources to rebuilding an area damaged by a fire immediately, or accept degraded performance while maintenance restores it bit by bit? Different groups will gain or lose influence depending on your decisions, and the overall health and maintenance of the fleet might be impacted as well. The long term implications start to add up - sending in the marines when you heard about a black market ring now means that the remaining black marketeers are starting to work against you, while the military now has more influence and control over fleet operations day to day. I’m sure that’s fine though, right? I mean, what could go wrong with having the military in control of key points throughout your fleet when you need to decide on their next special request? Navigating through decisions and balancing faction opinion and influence becomes some of your main concerns during these non-combat phases,
At the heart of resolving crisis, leading your forces, and investigating points of interest in Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes are your command staff. Notable people, civilian and military alike, they bring their skills and experience to give you options. Some will excel when used in dangerous negotiations, shifting the odds in your favour or eliminating the worse outcome options altogether. Others will excel in leading your combat craft or acting as crew for systems on your Gunstar, making things move faster, hit harder, and generally trying to tilt the balance of power in your favour. Unfortunately, Cylons can look like humans, and so you’ll also have to balance the paranoia in your fleet with the possibility that one or more of your staff are enemies in disguise. If you do find a Cylon agent, however, would you toss them out the airlock? Keep them for questioning? Trust that they still have control of their own actions and let them roam free? Resolving these dilemmas have impacts on morale and crew performance, beyond the direct impact of potentially losing a person you’ve come to count on, and invite you to look beyond the lens of video game into the core questions of ‘what is humanity / what makes someone human’ that the Battlestar Galactica franchise as a whole wrestled with.
As a rogue-like, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is built around the idea that what you do during each playthrough can help you on your next playthrough. Each battle you win accumulates Fate points that can be used to unlock upgrades, resources and generally improved starting conditions for future runs through the game. As a result, it's easy to feel overwhelmed on your first run, as you are at the weakest you will ever be. Don’t despair - survive as long as you can, and come back stronger.
Overall, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is a game that captures the feeling of the Battlestar Galactica universe, and keeps itself grounded by limiting the player to a small piece of it. This isn’t a game about endless resource gathering and giant fleets, it's a game about the more personal struggle to survive against all odds. Be prepared for combat sequences that will get your stress levels up, and non-combat interludes that make you really think about where every resource is best spent. The space battles are graphically appealing, and the static character art outside of combat works to convey what it needs to, while not distracting from the choices it is asking the player to make. It might not hold my attention for hundreds of hours, but there is quite a bit of replayability here, and it is well worth your time.
Score: 9 / 10
