Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes was provided by Dotemu for review. Thank you!
I wasn't sure what to expect from Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes. In fact, I hadn't even heard of it until I was offered the chance to review it, but I love the 2004 TV series, so I was interested to see if this game could live up to that standard. And I must say, I was pleasantly surprised.
Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes adopts the ever-popular roguelite approach, and given the premise of the Battlestar Galactica franchise, it makes a lot of sense for this game.
As captain of a Gunstar vessel, it's up to you to lead your ship and a convoy of civilian vessels through various procedurally generated sectors in order to meet up with the Battlestar Galactica, all while keeping the peace with the various colonist factions, upgrading your fleet and combat squadrons, and facing the ever-present (and growing) Cylon threat.
When it comes to gameplay, Scattered Hopes is a game of 2 halves. The first is managing your fleet. Here we are faced with opportunities or crises that can either help or hinder progress, as well as Points of Interest, where you can gather resources to keep your fleet alive and colonists happy.
This part of the game is mostly a balancing act. You'll be trying to gauge your relationship to the 3 factions in your crew, make sure you don't run out of resources, and gather as much as possible in order to upgrade your Gunstar and your Squadrons. The Crises, Opportunities, and POIs will all feed into this balancing act. Every choice you make advances time until the next battle (and FTL jump), so while it might seem mundane in nature, there are often times when you have to make a choice about what you want to do with the limited time you have, and Crises usually give you unavoidable negative effects you'll have to contend with.
These factors together ensured that even fleet management never seemed like a boring or tedious part of the game, keeping your mind engaged throughout as you try to figure out which choice is the lesser of two evils.
The other half of the gameplay is the battles themselves. At the end of each sector, you'll face a Cylon fleet that you will have to defend against until your FTL co-ordinates are locked in and you can make your escape. While the battles are real-time, you can pause at any point, and you will be pausing a lot.
The Cylons come in large numbers, and the game almost feels like a tower defense experience. Ships will warp in on the battlefield and continue towards your fleet, while the enemy ship will fire missiles. Your ships have limited range, so your input will be in the form of constantly repositioning them in order to head off incoming threats. Using the "tactical pause" feature to think and plan your maneuvers is essential to staying alive.
As the countdown towards your FTL jump continues, the enemy fleet grows in numbers to the point where you can't realistically defend against everything. This creates a hectic atmosphere and a certain sense of dread, as you often have to let your fleet take a beating before you can jump to safety, very reminiscent of the TV series.
Once we die, the run is over, and we'll be rewarded with experience points and fate points based on how well we did. Experience points allow us to level up, unlocking more potential items and squadrons to purchase at in-sector shops, while Fate Points can give advantages in future runs.
While the Fate Points do offer some useful benefits, such as more resources to use or the ability to retry a battle if you lose, I found these bonuses to be somewhat moderate compared to other roguelites. Don't expect there to be exponential improvements in power between runs; these are modest upgrades that might give an edge if skill level almost got you through a battle.
Because of this, improvement in Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes will come as much from your own skills improving as you learn the game, as it will from the progression mechanics giving you advantages. Learning which ships to use where, and the best time to use your vital Gunstar abilities like a flak bombardment or nuclear missile, is crucial. This game won't be for everyone, but as space strategy roguelites go, it's a good one.
To get Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes to boot on the Steam Deck, I had to go into Steam Game Properties and force it to use Proton 10.0-4; otherwise, it would crash back to Steam during the opening logos.
The game has no controller support, so you'll be using a keyboard+mouse controller layout, which the game defaulted to. Fortunately, the game is slower-paced, and using the touchpad is a perfectly fine way to play.
There are no graphical options in the game, regardless of whether you play on the Steam Deck or not. I'd recommend you limit the FPS to 30 using the in-game option. This helps with stability and also improves battery life. You won't be able to maintain 30 the entire time; certain screens do drop into the 20s, but thankfully, these are just dialogue scenes.
Power draw tends to be around 13W-15W during battles, spiking to 20W during fleet management, which gives us a battery life of around 3 hours on a Steam Deck OLED, and around 2 hours on a Steam Deck LCD. Temperatures were around 60 °C-65 °C.
The UI is rather small on the Steam Deck, and there is no UI scaling either, so be prepared to have some difficult-to-read text to contend with. You may wish to alter the controller layout in Steam Input to add a magnifier.
Some text is hard to read on the Steam Deck's display, and there is no UI scaling option. Screenshake can be disabled.
You can pause the game at any point during a battle to issue orders. There are also customizable difficulty settings and rebindable controls.
While the battle system is somewhat simplistic in nature, the tension created by constant crises, overwhelming enemy odds, and infighting amongst your fleet allows Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes to create a great atmosphere worthy of the Battlestar Galactica name.
Performance on the Steam Deck is acceptable at 30 FPS. While the game has no controller support, almost everything is controlled via the mouse and space bar, which are mapped to the right touchpad and the A button, respectively, making it easy to control.
このレビューはPC版に基づいています。
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Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes does a great job of putting you in the situation of a combat vessel facing overwhelming odds. You should expect a mostly stable 30 FPS on the Steam Deck, with decent battery life and controls.
