Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes Review

Arguably the most famous episode of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series is also one of the first, called 33. In it, every 33 minutes, the relentless Cylons show up like clockwork to pursue Galactica, driving the crew to the breaking point. It was a brilliant concept for a TV show, and a very similar idea works quite well for Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes. This roguelike strategy game about leading a small fleet on a quest to link up with Galactica immediately after the destruction of Caprica borrows that ticking clock and combines it with an unceasing barrage of both missiles and crises, giving a tense edge to its strategic resource management and relatively simple 2D tactical combat.

It's definitely worth watching at least the first season of Battlestar Galactica before diving into Scattered Hopes, in part because it's a classic sci-fi show in its own right, but also because it'll help you understand a lot of the mechanics that separate this from similar games. In short, every faster-than-light jump you make in your Gunstar – a smaller version of a Battlestar that's effectively very similar and leads a fleet of mostly unarmed civilian vessels – kicks off a race against the turn-based clock: you have a scant 10 turns to not only repair and upgrade your ships and crew, but also collect resources and manage the political friction between different factions of survivors, as well as handle an intentionally overwhelming number of crises before the Cylons arrive. At that point you have to avoid taking too much damage for two real-time minutes while the FTL engines spin up again, and repeat.

Even though you're not playing as Galactica or any of its crew, using the eerie theme music from the show goes a long way to establishing the BSG vibe. The art direction also generally works toward that goal, because while Scattered Hopes' 16-bit style doesn't look as true to the show as 2017's Battlestar Galactica Deadlock did, it's at least interesting in its approach (and serves it nearly as well as its clear space roguelike inspiration, the legendary FTL). What's not to like about the bright-blue flash of a nuclear explosion in space? The exception is when it zooms in on Cylon motherships at the beginning of each battle, where the pixelated textures on 3D models get stretched in unflattering ways. It's eye-catching, though, how that style is mixed with high-resolution portraits of the randomly generated characters that pop up during the frequent dialogue scenes. They're not animated beyond a subtle distortion effect that makes it look like they're breathing, and there's no voice acting at all, but the tradeoff is that there's a lot of variety to the crews that I appreciated after a few runs.

Combat sequences are a pretty straightforward real-time tactics game that you can pause at any moment to assign targets, use special abilities, and move ships out of the way of missiles and other attacks. These are relatively small-scale skirmishes, so you never have more than five fighters on the map – usually it's more like three – but you also have the weapons of your Gunstar available to launch when you spot an opportunity to wipe out a group of clustered ships with a flak burst or a well-placed nuke. (One of my favorites allows you to detonate enemy missiles remotely, so you can set off Cylon nukes as they pass by their own ships.) A fair amount of battlefield complexity emerges as your officers and fighters earn new traits from leveling up, and you have to figure out how to optimize active and passive abilities like earning temporary speed boosts after a kill, bouncing ballistic weapons from one target to another, or reflecting damage back at attackers, among many other possibilities.

There's a lot of variety to the crews that I appreciated after a few runs. On that note, I can't help but be a little disappointed that Scattered Hopes doesn't make any effort to replicate the show's flashy dogfighting; instead your Vipers, Mantises, and more are abstract representations that fly straight at their targets until they bump into them, then stop and duke it out until one or the other explodes. Meanwhile, artillery ships like Raptors have to hold completely still in order to bombard from afar, and support ships try to keep their distance. Next to the cinematic approach of something like Sins of a Solar Empire 2 or Homeworld 3, that looks a little lame – though I can understand how having everything flying every which way might make the action tough to follow when there are a couple of dozen Cylon ships and nuclear missiles screaming toward your Gunstar and you simultaneously have to keep your ships out of the blast radius of your own area-of-effect attacks.

There isn't a huge amount of variety from battle to battle, simply because the Cylons rely heavily on a handful of ship types that mostly just jump in around the map and mindlessly charge your capital ships unless your fighters draw them away. You can count on plenty of easily swatted Raiders and their heavy counterparts, augmented by smaller numbers of artillery ships, missile launchers, stealth ships, hacker ships, minelayers, and the especially annoying evasive Dodgers. That predictability (including the way the time and location of their arrival is precisely forecast) is the main thing that makes it possible to fend off so many of them with just a few ships of your own. But there are at least a few meaningful differences between fights: each Cylon mothership you square off against (which are mostly smaller cruisers, but Basestars show up for boss fights) gives its accompanying fighters certain bonuses, such as speed or damage boosts, and some can even neutralize your non-nuclear missiles. Occasionally, battlefields will also be littered with devastating minefields to avoid or asteroids that provide defensive bonuses you can use to your tactical advantage.

In every battle, though, you're always watching the two-minute timer tick down until the moment you can jump to safety, often getting out by the skin of your teeth while an enormous final wave of Cylon ships fires into the empty space your Gunstar and two civilian ships occupied an instant before. That's a built-in tension that Scattered Hopes makes good repeated use of. It is slightly maddening, though, that the auto-pause triggers when the clock counts down to zero but not the instant your last fighter docks – that's almost always the moment I want to mash the Jump button to avoid leaving anybody behind.

As you progress from sector to sector, you're usually given two options for which path to take (in typical roguelike fashion) and I've found that the single biggest predictor of whether I'll have a good run or not is if I luck into recruiting several new crewmembers in the first few jumps. Not only can these officers pilot fighters and man Gunstar weapon stations to boost their abilities, they also each give you at least one free action to resolve a situation (which would otherwise cost valuable supplies) or gather extra resources and better ships. That's absolutely invaluable because the benefits snowball quickly – even though having more crewmembers makes it a little trickier to figure out which one of them is the Cylon saboteur. You can recover from a small crew early on if you manage to rescue and upgrade civilian ships that automatically generate a ton of resources, but nothing beats pure manpower in my experience.

There's a built-in tension that Scattered Hopes makes good repeated use of. It's never a surprise when a new crisis pops up since they're marked on a timeline in each sector, but they're usually inconvenient because you're probably already struggling. A lot of the problems that arise are one-offs that can be dealt with quickly, but many are strung together as fairly elaborate stories with multi-part resolutions that require your team to fix airlocks, repair damage, treat wounded civilians, arrest suspects, or even fight special battles before they're resolved and their negative effects are lifted. There are even personal quests that pay homage to Starbuck's death wish from the show and uncover characters' hidden pasts, unlocking powerful upgrades. That said, for a game that's meant to be played over and over again, it seems like there aren't quite enough of them to go around; I was only a couple of runs in before I was having to click though a bunch of dialogue I'd already read, rushing to the decision at the end about which faction to please and who to raise tensions with. (I've even gotten the same story event multiple times in a single run.) Yes, one of the show's most quotable catchphrases is "This has happened before and it will happen again," but this is taking that a little too far.

That's especially true of the hidden Cylon story that happens on every single run (except, notably, on the one where I accidentally got them killed before they were revealed). It's not really about deduction, but a process of elimination as you're given "clues" every jump that highlight suspicious crewmembers, which you then have to guess at and spend resources to investigate until you get lucky. That part isn't all that interesting, but the fact that there are two different ways the confrontation can play out based on whether the Cylon knows they're a Cylon or not is a fun twist, and there are interesting decisions to be made in both outcomes.

A run of Scattered Hopes takes a bit on the longer side for a roguelike, usually around two hours. (There's an achievement for finishing in under 90 minutes.) But that means your crew and ships get lots of opportunities to level up on the journey, and you gather progressively more randomized passive and active abilities that you have to mix and match based on whatever comes your way. Pairing an officer who had the Radioactive Bullets skill with a Viper that had bullets that could ricochet from one target to another was a fun one, as was putting a crewmember who significantly reduced cooldowns and had a chance to earn extra resources from every kill onto a missile launcher with a big blast radius. One time I ended up with four powerful artillery ships that, thanks to stacked range bonuses, could fire across the entire map and completely dominated every late-game battle.

Of course, it took me a while to get to the point where I was regularly winning – my first six runs ended in failure, largely because the Hades-style progression system withholds some pretty crucial abilities like more starting resources, re-rolling random upgrade choices, restarting a failed battle, and increasing the odds of getting legendary-quality items and traits. Once you unlock a fair number of those, victory becomes much more attainable – though, naturally, you'll also unlock new Gunstar variants that put more focus on castable weapons rather than fighters, and every successful run as each of them unlocks a tougher version where things can go wrong that much faster. So even though I've already done 35 hours worth of runs, I haven't gotten anywhere near beating the toughest challenges.