Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes

I have rendezvoused with the Battlestar Galactica finally after my fourth run on normal difficultly. I really enjoy this game. People saying it is similar to FTL are correct, it is also very similar to the beginning of Season 1 of the show! The concept is very well executed. I feel like I'm pushing a fleet and its crew to their limits in a mad chase across the galaxy where every jump is a gamble with life and death. I like the resources and gathering, character, fleet, weapon, and squadron mechanics. They are useful, engaging, and add the right amount of depth to the game. I like the reputation mechanic and how the affects if you get/what crisis you get, or boons, but I do not like how negative events have a larger effect than positive events on reputation. I like the crisis and boon quests themselves too. There are some crisis that are easy, some that are arduous. While there are a lot of crisis and it can get frustrating to get hit over and over by them, with careful decision making and usage of resources, plus some luck, you can overcome! Makes them feel like a real crisis! I think there should be some additional boon quests with more profound weapon or fleet rewards. I think this game is appropriately difficult, especially since it is supposed to a replayable roguelike (roguelite? idk) EDIT: yeah way too many negative minor situations for how many crisis there are. you need to decrease the amount of minor negative situations there are and add in some positive situations because otherwise there is just no semi-regular way to increase relations with factions

As a Battlestar Galactica fan, I appreciate the homage this game pays to the show, and genuinely enjoy the flow of the game loop. If you are a fan, its a must have in your library.

The biggest sin that Scattered Hopes commits is that its pre-title screen intro only plays *half* of the BSG intro theme, and stops right before the "Hup!" followed by quick cuts and Bear McCreary drums. Every time you start the game up, if you're a fan of the show, you're basically given BSG intro blue balls. In a way, this intro issue: having half of what the fan wants, then purposefully making the objectively bad choice to not pay-off a set-up expectation is a perfect description of the overall quality of the game as a whole. Because Scattered Hopes is a good example of a game that starts strong and makes a good first impression, but fumbles hard in its second half until it becomes a frustrating bore. The core set-up is "FTL, but Battlestar Galactica" where you're managing a ragtag fleet of ships desperately running from the cylons - just like in the show! Taking FTL and scaling it up from a single ship to a fleet is a good idea that fits this IP perfectly. Largely, the game captures the show's essential elements and vibe well. You send viper squads after raiders in real-time with pause tactical combat segments, uncover a humanoid Cylon double agent, manage numerous crises and spin plates balancing time and resource decisions between attacks, and there's a mysterious mysticism undergirding this desperate scramble to a finish line that takes a few hours to get to in any single run. These runs are presented well. While it's a bit low budget and "mobile game" to not have VO work, and the DotEmu lowpoly/pixel style (that's shared with their Starship Troopers game) may not be to everyone's taste, the music and graphical presentation are strong overall. Missing McCreary drums aside, the game's original soundtrack in particular is quite good and properly moody. The larger focus on the RNG created "heroes" in your fleet and how they drive with the story based "crisitunity" event segments essentially takes an element of FTL - the story shard textbox encounters you get when hopping into new systems - and expands on them greatly in a way that creates much more detailed and character driven micro-narratives in between jumps. This fits the IP perfectly, and it's a good expansion on this element from the gameplay inspiration SH is borrowing from. And so long as you aren't put off by the absurd starting difficulty obviously meant to make you fail hard in your initial attempts until the game's "Fate" meta-rewards system gives you enough edge to counter the unfair difficulty balance, the game is good fun and captures the show well. At least, until you beat it the first time. And then . . . it's all downhill from there. By the time of that first win (my fifth attempt), I'd seen 85-90%+ of the event narratives and content, figured out how to beat all of the battle set-ups, and dealt with the ham-fisted "forced-to-fail" faction system that tries your patience more than enough. It was already starting to wear thin by then. The game designers then try to entice you to keep playing with (a small handful of) new initial fleet set-ups to play with and "Extinction" levels, which increase the difficulty in specific and incremental game conditional ways to counter-balance all the help the Fate meta-game system grants on replays. But ultimately, they want too much investment out of the player here. To see the "true" ending of the meta narrative that pops up throughout the game, you have to get to Extinction X (10 if you don't speak Roman numeral), which, since you only unlock it on the first win, means you MUST beat the game 11 times. ELEVEN TIMES? It's just absurd. Ain't nobody but the biggest autists have got time for that, and if that's who you're appealing to, you chose the wrong IP to make a game out of. This is not Sonic the Hedgehog. Because nothing else really changes. It's the same crises and events and the same battles over and over and over again. The extra detail and dialogue on the narrative on events becomes a drag, not exciting. The cylon agent becomes busywork. The battles become boring and predictable. Sure, the Extinction levels and more specialized alternate fleets make the margins for victory narrower. You have to walk an already tight rope even more tightly, and you'll likely fall off again too, adding even more runs to the tally and . . . it's just too much of an ask for a game set-up that doesn't bring enough to the table to justify it. Instead, it actively drags down a decent initial experience. The fundamental issue is two-fold: 1) There isn't nearly enough content variation in any of the game's systems. Narrative driven crises need far more variants and more opaque outcomes, and battles need not just more possible enemy spawn set-ups and buffs, but new swing mechanics, objectives and scripting that react to player success or failure mid-battle to make them less predictable. FTL's combat worked because it built complexity out of many simple moving parts and was FAR more variable and dynamic in ways that this system just . . . isn't. 2) The vanilla "No Fate" run should be balanced to be MUCH more beatable, while Fate Boons and Extinction levels and the meta narrative should be tied together. Because the vanilla run is tuned to be too difficult the game FORCES repeat play to earning Fate Boons to beat it rather than making a tough but fair game that would naturally feature repetition via some retries. Then if FORCES more repetition on Extinction levels on top of that. Fate should've worked on a point-buy system from the start, so they're granted if the player takes on more extinction level maluses to counterbalance the boons, and you should've been able to take on Extinction levels up to your Fate level regardless of how many times the player has beaten runs. Then that true ending could have been achievable (not likely, but possible) potentially on your first successful run, not a condition only if the player to beat the game eleven frakking times! Aside from the fact that all the repetition takes the show's arc line "all of this has happened before and will happen again" far, FAR too literally, the devs show an immense insecurity in their game design when they take an element of the game they're borrowing from - FTL is a game you could easily restart many times - and force it on the player rather than create the systems that naturally encourages replayability by having enough meaningful difference between runs to make them feel unique. Which is a shame, because ultimately, this game leaves a much worse impression than the other BSG tie-in that it replaced, "Deadlock," which had the opposite problem that Scattered Hopes has (being hard to get into, but having long legs to stand on once you did get into its meaty and deep gameplay systems). I gave this one a fair chance, but much like the Gaius Baltar presidency on New Caprica, this was a mistake. And if this review feels a bit too long, a bit too repetitive, a bit too confused . . . well congratulations, you've gotten the Scattered Hopes experience, and I've saved you $25! Thank me later.

Fun game with a good mix of realtime and turn based tactics...

12std im Spiel und praktisch alles schon durch. Früher machte man noch richtige, vorallem FERTIGE spiele. das ist nur ein Kriesenmanager ohne grossartiges gameplay. Dies ist ein Grundgerüst für ein richtiges Spiel mehr aber auch nicht

Very Good

A nice "little game", a true homage to the series, if you like the mix of survival management and semi real time space battles, it really gets to you, of course you'll need to replay the same things over and over to progress but there is depth enough to keep you interested in new strategies to go farther every time. I can only recommend a game I've played 20h+ and still want to play more.