Brutal space strategy roguelite Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is out now

Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes from Alt Shift and Dotemu is out now so here's my thoughts on it after spending some time with it. Disclosure: a key was sent to GamingOnLinux.

Even if you've not seen the modern TV series, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is a tense and challenging roguelite strategy game that you can sink many hours into. Priced quite reasonably too even with a bigger name attached to it. What it does is take the tense atmosphere from the series, inspired by a particular episode (33) where the Galactica fleet is constantly on the run and turns it into a repeatable tactical fight for survival. How repeatable though will depend on your free time as runs aren't exactly short.

If you enjoy roguelike / roguelite strategy games and you've played the likes of FTL: Faster Than Light and Crying Suns and enjoyed either, it's like an interesting blending of the two together. In a lot of ways it's many parts of Crying Suns wearing an updated skin of the Battlestar Galactica universe.

While it may disappoint some that you're not in direct control of some big beast of a Battlestar, you instead command a Gunstar which is a smaller class of warship. If the Gunstar is destroyed during your run, that's you, so it's game over (if your overall fleet health drops to zero). Being "canon" or not (I'm not about to start that fight) in terms of Battlestar Galactica it's an interesting look into some possible wider action in the Battlestar Galactica universe. A series that's ripe for all sorts of different stories with its curious special mixture of technology and religion based on seemingly real gods (I'm trying not to spoil too much here, if you know - you know).

In Scattered Hopes you're faced with the seemingly impossible. You have to jump through 12 sectors of enemy territory controlled by the robotic race of Cylons and eventually hopefully link up with the old Battlestar Galactica for a somewhat safe haven. You have to form your own fleet of ragtag civilians and pilots and attempt to deal with all the fleet-wide and individual character issues that arise as you go through. Things get messy, really really messy.

See the launch trailer below:

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Don't expect to be able to survive your first run. Outside of the (pretty good) tutorial, there's still so much to learn about the fleet management and all the times you have to weigh up risk vs reward that you'll no doubt take a few wrong turns. The difficulty is not to be dismissed, it certainly will challenge you.

You never have enough time to do everything you want which is key, you're forced into making the difficult choices here. The events system is the main challenge outside of battles. Something is always broken and in need of repair or you need to deal with a wider event, and every action you take jumps time forwards where the other events are a step closer to being unresolvable. And, the Cylons are then another step closer to finding you, as you have limited turns to sit in each sector before needing to battle and then FTL jump away. You simply cannot do everything, so you have to pick as wisely as you can.

During the fleet management sections, you also get to sort out your squadrons. If they shot down enough Cyclons, they will level up - and you can then pick special upgrades for them like upgrading their main weapons, giving them additional weapons and more. You also have heroes (part of your command inner circle) that have their own abilities that can help out during fleet events and battles, and they can level up too.

Factions can also become a problem for your fleet. They're split into a few different groups, and you need to also weigh up your options here on how you deal with each of them. Helping one may anger another, resulting in a specific crisis appearing later on when they hate you.

The battles are a tricky sort too and quite limited since you're just stalling for time until you can do an FTL jump. Real-time with pause available to help you make decisions. You will get constantly overwhelmed by the amount of enemies, so pausing is necessary. You need to decide what squadrons to deploy, what main fleet weapons to activate and position your squadrons to make the most out of them. Fleet weapons like Flak need a specific position too, so it's constantly click-click-click to make decisions everywhere.

And, even when you're ready to leave a battle, you still have to get your squadrons docked back in your ship otherwise they'll get wrecked so you can take a lot of damage during this stage too.

Thankfully, you also get some boosts from battles outside of your squadrons levelling up. You get to pick between certain "blessings" which include a mixture of rewards to improve your fleet like restoring hull points to a particular ship, gaining fuel and more.

Main Highlights:

• A Thrilling, Story-driven Take on the Iconic Sci-Fi Franchise: In Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hope, the infamous sentient robot species known as the Cylons has decimated humanity’s haven and is closing in on your Fleet. Your only hope of surviving is to resist Cylon attacks until you can jump to the next sector of the galaxy, in a grand bid to ultimately reach the iconic carrier ship, the Battlestar Galactica.

• Life-or-death Decision Making: You cannot win an all-out battle, and time between Cylon assaults is slim; learn and capitalize on your crew’s individual strengths as you find a way to succeed against all odds. Choose your priorities between battles, whether it’s searching for resources, resolving disputes among your in-Fleet factions, making repairs or upgrades, or searching for potential Cylon imposters among your ranks…

• High-stakes Combat: Deploy fighters and direct them in hybrid real time and tactical battles to dispatch the Cylons, minimizing damage to your central ship while wielding its onboard defenses against your gravest threats.

• Vast Replayability: No two runs in Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes are ever the same. Each attempt brings new lessons as you adapt to defy your odds of survival, and tactical options broaden as you unlock additional squadrons, weapons and traits as well as meta upgrades to benefit future runs.

Overall I've certainly enjoyed my time with it. The main let-down really are the battles, due to how they've always just small skirmishes so there's really not a lot of variety there. Deploy a few squadrons, move them around, fire a couple fleet weapons - repeat until you FTL jump away. That, and you end up seeing a bit too many repeating events and crisis, it just needs a bit more padding there. Apart from that though, it's pretty great for a big fan of the BSG series (like me), but I think it may fall a bit too flat for a wider audience because the truth is - there's much better strategy games out there. Still, they created a really thoroughly tense experience here that fans of roguelike strategy games can appreciate and with the multiple hour time for each run it allows you to get quite engrossed in it - just don't get too attached to anyone.

I think if you went and watched the modern BSG TV series to understand the references, and the lore behind what's going on, you'll enjoy it vastly more than going in without it. A worthy companion for fans to pick up.

Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes is not really a game about winning anything. The odds are stacked against you. It's just pure tactical survival from one moment to the next.

It works perfectly on Desktop Linux (Fedora KDE) with Proton 11 Beta.