Of all the ‘Star’ franchises, Battlestar Galactica is the one I know the least about. When I was growing up, it was a fierce battle between Wars and Trek. I never cared much for either, being a Stargate SG-1 fan. I just sat in the corner with my DVD Boxsets. But Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes was my first introduction to that series. I went into it with a lot of trepidation, the same way I would if handed a Star Trek game. To my surprise, I quite enjoyed the little snippets of lore. It was enough to spark an interest in the series itself, which is something I never expected.
It’s a story very much about humanity. I didn’t encounter any mysterious aliens in my time with Scattered Hopes. Just scared people trying to survive. Keeping the focus on the people at the heart of it, and their paranoia and fear, made it speak to me a lot. I don’t know if the series is anything like that, but I’m definitely interested if it is. But a focus on survival in a video game causes it to split into two halves: when you’re fighting for your life, and when you’re not. Scattered Hopes does alright on the former, but in the latter everything starts to spin in circles.
Hopping Through Space
A little backstory is needed before delving too deeply into Scattered Hopes. The key figures in Battlestar Galactica are the Cylons, a robotic race originally created by humans. At some point, they turned against their creators and began wiping them off the galactic map. When Scattered Hopes opens, things are going very badly for the humans. One of their key planets, Caprica, is in flames. Captains of military ships gather civilians to them, and undergo an emergency FTL jump. Their end goal is to reach the Battlestar Galactica, which is the last bastion of hope. Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of Cylons on the way and they’re not happy about their prey escaping.
And that’s the foundation of the game. We start at the ruins of human civilisation and end at the Galactica. To get there, we need to make the choice to warp to one of two locations. Warp enough times and we reach a boss. Keep pressing on and we win. I’ll touch on the combat in a mo, but the other half of the game is about fleet management. On the surface, it’s about keeping our ships in tact. Our Gunstar, and the civvie ships, get damaged in combat. This may create critical events, which require resources to fix. Ignore them and you’ll suffer hull damage or a hit to fleet health. If our Gunstar explodes, or fleet health gets too low, we lose. Key resources are scarce, so keeping things running becomes quite tense.
On a deeper level, there are heroes and factions. Both play an important part in the plethora of choices you make in Scattered Hopes. Heroes are key figures that can intervene in crises, as well as bolstering units in combat. They have morale and their own health bars, however, so you need to be careful how you treat them. They are invaluable and worth scooping up at every opportunity. We also have factions. These ships are clogged with people, all banding together into different groups. Pleasing a faction will net you quests, but it’s often at the expense of another. Annoy a faction too much and they’ll launch a crisis, which often means shouldering a negative effect. These crises occur without the factions too. Surviving in space, it turns out, is a pretty tricky thing.
The Tricky Choices
To ominously hint at my final opinion, I’d say this management phase works well at first. You have about ten turns to do things before combat hits, and it can be genuinely stressful (in a good way). Upgrades and repairs all use ‘scrap’, whereas most choices use ‘supplies’. Scrounging for these things uses fuel. So it’s a constant balancing act, and a crisis at the exact wrong time can cause everything to unravel. In my last run I had both the Workers and the Military grumpy at me and was constantly fending off crises. This is on easy difficulty, mind you, as my tactical skills fell apart completely in normal. It was entertaining though. Trying to figure out who to butter up and where to spend the scrap were enjoyable choices.
The combat, too, is great. Spiritually, it shares a lot with tower defence games. Combat starts with an enemy ship warping in, which sparks off waves of smaller ships all coming for your Gunstar and civvies. A timer begins ticking down, at the end of which you can warp to the next sector. Your goal then is simple: survive. You can deploy your ships from your hanger and position them around the battlefield. There’s a decent range of ships, with different ranges and abilities. You generally want artillery to take down threats from a distance, and a speedy number to hunt down anything bigger. If all else fails, deploy the nukes. Combat is a game of constant multi-tasking and it’s really fun when you get into it. It errs on the side of overwhelming for me at times, but that fits the theme well.
But now it’s time to unravel that ‘at first‘ that I dropped up there. The core problem with Scattered Hopes is that everything pulls from a very shallow pool, despite incorporating multiple runs into its plot. We fight the same three bosses in the exact same way each time. Even the interval combat sections start to feel like they’re repeating themselves. In the fleet management, there’s a remarkably small pool of events. They repeat every run, with the most egregious being the hero questlines. Finishing a run and starting a new one, only to have a new hero say the exact same thing as the hero you just left: it takes you out of things a little bit.
Scattered Hopes – Greatness Running In Cycles
There are sparks of genius in Scattered Hopes. I really like the recurring hidden Cylon event, where you have to sniff out the spy among your heroes. It does dissolve down into just pumping supplies into it until you find the right one, but the energy is there. Scattered Hopes also looks lovely, with beautiful pixel art. It does fall back on flat text boxes a lot though, so there is an aura of coldness about it. Yet the repetition drags down everything else. I was just clicking the skip dialogue button by the end. It needs a bigger pool of quests, and more variation in the beginning. There are only four Gunstar types, which need to be unlocked, and the starting ships are the same every time. So it takes a while for each run to differentiate itself.
I hope that Alt Shift don’t give up on Scattered Hopes because they’ve laid a solid groundwork. But as I keep saying, roguelikes live and die on their ability to deal with repetition. It’s a tricky thing, but the main path to success is to make every run different from the word go. Scattered Hopes really struggles with this, as every run starts to feel the same. Given that a run could last a couple of hours, it becomes a lot harder to justify a new run after one falls apart. Still, it works as a nice intro to the TV show. Unfortunately, with the rate at which I watch TV shows, the robots will have long destroyed the Earth before I get to it.
