Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander

It was fun up until the final battle, which had a ridiculous difficulty jump that I clearly couldn't have beaten without hoarding resources prior to triggering the final event. It's not satisfying to work for 12 hours then get it all thrown in the trash because you can't see into the future. Disappointing.

Halcyon 6 is a space turned base tactics game with a mix of some good ideas thrown in with some poorly thought out ones. The basic premise is your federation is pretty much wiped out by a giant enemy ship. You're left in charge of a space station. You gather resources (material, gas, crew, fuel) from planets and use them to build structures in an X-com style manner, build ships, do research, etc. There are 3 styles of ships (Tactical, Science, Engineering) each with 2 variations, a more offensive/defensive style. You can select the weapons/abilities those ships have any time they're docked at your station. Each ship needs a crew. Crews also come in one of those 3 styles and can only pilot affiliated ships. As you go along, your crews level up which allow you to put them in higher tier ships, do more effective upgrades, and select special powers. Initially, the only 2 aliens you'll run into are the bad aliens (Chrulls) and some space pirates. Once you reach a certain point other races will show up to interact/fight/etc. The game has both space and ground combat. Most battles will be a 3 on 3 fight. In space your ships fight, on the ground your crew fights. If you don't have enough crew with you for a ground battle, you are given “green shirt” cadets to fill in and fight with your crew. Do all this for long enough until you defeat the Chrull Mothership. As mentioned, this game is a mix of good and bad, I'm mostly just going to hit the bad. Let's start with resource gathering. You start with some planets producing resources, but most of the planets in your sector have had their refineries destroyed. These need to be repaired, which costs resources. Then each of your planets have upgrades to generate resources faster and increase max holding potential, which again costs resources. Your resources generate automatically but do not become yours automatically. You must fly around to each of your planets, collect those resources, and then fly back to the space station to actually receive them. There are a lot of planets. You can't automate this route, you must manually do this, and each of those flights takes about 2-4 seconds. You will spend at least 5-10 hours of this game doing nothing but flying a shuttle in some sort of pattern between planets to collect resources and fly back to drop them off. It is incredibly tedious. I have no clue why they did this, but it is awful, and slows the game down to a crawl during this portion. Eventually, you're given the ability to research automated collectors. This research costs resources, then you must build each of the collectors (which cost the most precious resource), then you must fly to each planet and install the collectors. Think of this like one of those clicker activites that braindead people do on their phones/ipads, except each click takes around 2-8 seconds to register and you have to wait for the prior click to finish before you can click the next one. The second big issue is that research gets locked until you hit certain events. Once you hit those events, the next wave of research pops up and you can go until you hit the next event that unlocks new research. So you might want to get higher tier ships, but you can't even research those higher tier ships until you hit whatever event is keeping them locked out. It's stupid for no reason. Combat is also an issue. The main issue is that just like the majority of games with tactical combat where you can only use 3 people/ships, your strategies are extremely limited. You're given a lot of options, but you're really just going to do the same thing for every single battle. They try to change this up a bit by having each planet have a different status effect with a much higher resistance, but the only one that really matters is if it's a planet where “Ship Disabled” is given higher resistance. The other problem with combat is that throughout the game, your ships are almost always lower tiered than your enemies, so you're constantly fighting an uphill battle. When you have tier 1 ships, they'll often have 1 or more tier 2 ships. Once you research tier 2 ships and build some, enemies start getting tier 3 ships, and so on. Not only are you fighting higher tier ships, but enemy ships of equal tiers typically have around 50% more life than your ships. If your tier 1 ship has 900 HP, theirs typically have 1350 HP. Unfortunately, most of the combat early on comes down to RNG, especially if you're fighting in a planet that provides high resistance to 'ship disabled'. If enemy ships repeatedly target one of your ships or score a critical hit on it, it can be destroyed before you even have a chance to heal it up. This leaves you with the choice to continue on needing to rebuild costly ships and hire a new crew & train them up, or simply save scum. If you don't save scum, you're going to waste a whole lot more time gathering resources to catch back up. You're given the option to make a ton of ships, but there's no reason to do this. First, you likely will never have the resources to build more than 3 of your highest tier ships and have them running around at once. The only exception to this will be at the endgame where you will have so many resources, you won't know what to do with them. Second, you're then spreading out much needed experience since higher tier ships require higher leveled crews. Even if you build more than 3 tier 5 ships, you likely will not have a crew capable of piloting them anyway. So you'll spend the game using the 3 same crew the whole game long for anything outside of your space station. The rest of your crew will just sit around on the space station either building things or generating you resources. The only real exception to this is early on where you will have one of your crew in a shuttle driving around to each planet to collect resources. If you have a ship/crew killed, you'll reload to save time. Once you hit tier 4 ships, combat mostly becomes incredibly simple. Once you have tier 5 ships, nothing will ever threaten you again, barring incredibly bad luck or the final boss. Combat happens more often and becomes a time sink. I don't hate this game. The interactions with the other alien races are humorous and provide some much welcomed relief from the nonstop resource gathering and battles. There are some choices that matter, especially early on when you have no clue what anything does. Halcyon 6 simply never rises above being an average game, and arguably may not even meet that standard if you look at the amount of time spent doing tedious resource farming and thoughtless battles.

Fun at first just get's really grindy and samey for the rest of the game once you reach about half way or so. Don't really think it's that worth it in the long run.

It has so much potential, so sad... I started the campaign now twice but could not convince myself to play until the end. I immediately fell in love with the pixelgraphics and the music. They are so well done and distract from the gameplay deficits in the beginning. Also, Halcyon has base building, tactical combat and RPG elements. These three are typically a killer combo and a guaranteed success, especially when paired with multiple character classes. The space combat paired with the ground combat is well done in principle. However, a few hours in you start to realize that you are always using the same combo and new ships only make you deal more damage and increases the amount of damage you can take. Also the character skills you unlock don´t really make a big difference. You can try different strategies from the beginning but always end up with the same combos after a while. Of course, there are random penalties during the combats that should make you use different combos but they don´t really have an impact. Also, the campaign is disappointing. At first it looks really promising but over time only the waves of enemies become stronger and not much changes. There is not enough variety through side missions. You basically only try to unlock the best ships you can unlock before the next big guy arrives at your station. I will most likely never finish it, regardless how many new games I start. Really sad, since it could be such a great game!

I bought this game Friday. I played 23 hours. I just finished it. It's Tuesday. I didn't play it on the easiest setting, nor was it the most difficult. But considering in the last 4.5 days, an almost 10 year old game had me completely engaged for 23 hours.... I'd definitely say it was worth the $16 or whatever I paid for it.

Imagine if Final Fantasy and X-Com had a love child... and that love child watched Star Trek, Star Wars, listened to Fear Factory and Static-X... also drank a lot of chocolate milk and thought religion was nonsense... that's Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander... a great turn based sci-fi game. Here you can relax, commit genocide on an alien race or just expand your base... do what you want, you're free. 10/10

an oversimplified attempt at a mish mash of several games that didnt quite work well together. every system ended up uninspired, shallow and, in the end, just boring. even though the idea of the game sounds pretty cool (and plays well for the first hour or so), you quickly realize that, actually, there's not really much going on for the game. hoard materials, research everything, fly around for "quests", kill everything on sight. finally, the combat is really, really, reaaaaally convoluted. an attempt at an "smart" turn combat, where you should strive to build combos, in the end, it falls flat at the inefficient and uninspired. you could buy this game when massive discounted, but even then, I dont recommend. you could spend your hours with a much better game.

made obsolete by the lightspeed edition less than a year later.

Played this game when it first came out not on steam and while it can be a bit grindy at times and have some difficulty spikes at spots, it's still fun, challenging on higher difficulties and looks charming. If you can get it on a discount and like pixel art it's worth a buy.

lo mejor de lo mejor y dificil de pasar asi que lo recomiendo.