Reviewed: November 9, 2007
Reviewed by: David Hillyer
Publisher
Sierra Online
Developer
Auran
Released: October 24, 2007
Genre: Action
Players: 1-4
6
7
4
5
5.6
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
For those of you who were not born when the original Star Wars came out, you probably think the current Battlestar Galactica series on Sci-Fi Channel is new. Well it is… sort of. You see back in the late 70’s when Star Wars was thrilling all us youngsters; Universal was developing a big budget TV series called Battlestar Galactica. It had a huge number of viewers, but back then there was only broadcast TV, so everyone had less than 10 stations available to watch and the viewer numbers were not so spread out. Networks now would kill for the viewer numbers Galactica had back then. But that was then, and the show lasted only one season.
There were lots of toys and VHS tapes, and conventions. It didn’t take them long to realize they screwed up, but everyone had moved on to other things and a short-lived spin-off was made called Galactica 1980. To this day the horror that was Galactica 1980 still gives people nightmares (FYI, it’s coming to DVD soon too).
Bring us to present day where any real creativity has long since left Hollywood. So it didn’t take long before the infamous ‘powers that be’ saw a classic show they could remake/exploit, which brings us to the new “re-imagined” Battlestar Galactica. It turns out Sci-Fi Channel was right, and they have a hit series on their hands with lots of media and merchandising to exploit. They are about to start the fourth and final season – though rumors of a spin-off series are making the rounds.
Thus we arrive at a slick little marketing ploy that is small video games. In this case there have been quite a few months since a new Galactica episode has been on the air. So now we have a backstory DVD coming called Razor, and a small Xbox Live game to keep the product in front of the consumers. Generally with Xbox Live games I don’t have too high of expectations. I mean, these are usually little arcade games that don’t cost too much to make. So we fork over our $5 worth of Microsoft Points and get a few hours entertainment before we go back to the $60 game we’re addicted to this month.
So when I heard Battlestar Galactica was coming to Xbox Live I wasn’t sure what to expect. Surely, Universal would want their franchise to have a good representation. There are a few space combat simulators already out there so hopefully this would be a new twist.
The Xbox Live version of Battlestar Galactica is your basic arcade space battle game… with a smaller battlefield. You pick your match type, the battlefield, and your side and you’re off for a 5, 10, or 15-minute battle. When you start the game you have to choose between Single or Multi player. In Single Player mode you pick either a mission based campaign or just go into an ‘instant action’ battle.
Campaign mode lets you go through 10 missions, based on the TV episodes, as a pilot for the Colonial Fleet. These missions are incredibly easy and don’t take long to get through. Even on high difficulty it didn’t take much practice to rip right through these. So I wouldn’t buy the game if you were just going to play offline. Instant action lets you pick from straight Deathmatch or Team Deathmatch. You then pick from 7 battlefields, 3 difficulty levels, 2-16 bot players, and match time of 5, 10, or 15 minutes.
You then pick your ship. For the Colonial Fleet you pick from the standard Viper II (similar to the classic Viper), the Viper VII (a faster more maneuverable Viper), a Blackbird (good for stealth and ambush), or a Combat Raptor (big guns but it moves slower than snail snot). For the Cylon Fleet you pick from the standard Raider, Speed Raider, Cloak Raider, and Heavy Raider. Basically the same specs as the Colonials, just with different skin.
Then the mayhem ensues. You are placed in a certain area of space (with sort of invisible boundaries) and you have at it. You see the red dots on your radar and steer the ship toward them and start blasting. You have standard guns, missiles, and special weapons. Your ship is fairly maneuverable – you have a replenishable power supply to perform tricks to avoid or track enemy ships. You can do quick 180’s or barrel rolls, boost or slam on the reverse thrusters. If you run low on juice, there are little glowing energy orbs floating around in space you can fly over to restore your energy. As in the show, the ships fly with realistic physics (well, as realistic as TV shows get). The ships have inertia and you have to apply thrusters in a certain way to get where you want to go.
Usually the real fun comes in the multiplayer online modes. You pick from the usual player match or ranked match. In both modes you can just go for the quick match, or set up some criteria in custom match, or you can host your own room with create match. There are 3 online match modes: Deathmatch (you vs. everyone), Team Deathmatch (Colonials vs. Cylons), or Domination. In Deathmatch you pick from 10 maps, in Domination you have 5 maps.
The first week this game was out it was pretty easy to find a game online. Since then it’s sporadic at best. Often times during the day there would not be a single player to shoot. So a lot of the replay value is already gone. Considering there are only 758 ranked players as of the review date… good luck finding a game. In short, Battlestar Galactica is your basic arena battle game.
There are 12 Achievements ranging from simply completing the boot camp, up to getting 5,000 total online ranked kills. Given the lack of online players, some of these achievements might be almost impossible to get without finding a friend online to just kill each other all day.
There is downloadable content in the form of a Theme pack (150 points) and Gamer Picture (80 points). I suspect they planned introduce more arenas for download, but given the lackluster reception the game has received, they probably moved on to other projects in a hurry. It would have been nice to have an arena editor or some other kind of custom content.
Download the free demo of Battlestar Galactica. You’ll get the idea of what it’s like. If you like it, may the Lords of Kobol be with you. Get used to playing it by yourself.
This isn’t a bad game. It’s just like most other arcade space shooters, except this has a Battlestar Galactica skin. Great if you are a fan, but for everyone else… ehhh. I suspect, as shown by the lack of players online, after killing an hour with this thing, your desire to play it will be about as high as the desire to watch an episode of Galactica 1980. Save your brain cells and your Microsoft Points, find something better to do.
For an Xbox Live game I must say the graphics are good. Though it’s a basic space based arena battle game so there really isn’t all that much to drool over. You have 15 small arenas with different obstacles (different shaped asteroids), and the ships. All of which are rendered very well and the backgrounds have ships and nebula and other neat things you can fly toward but never reach. Don’t you just hate 2D space?
Completely underwhelming. The menu music is about as exciting as it gets in this game and that’s barely enough to keep my eyes open. They do have the authentic TV sounds from the ship guns and thrusters, but there is nothing else. No voiceovers, nothing. It would have been cool to have some taunt buttons with preprogrammed Cylon voices saying “by your command” or Colonials saying “frak you!”, but you might just as well mute the TV and put a CD in the stereo.
This game cost an astounding 800 Microsoft points to download. Granted the graphics and overall feel of the game are above average for an Xbox Live game. But 800 points is a bit steep – and I think that’s one reason there are not many players to be found online. There are online leaderboards, which basically tell you how many people are not playing the game anymore. But even if there were thousands of players online, it would still be a basic space battle shooter and it just seems like I’ve played this several times before with different visuals.
Thankfully my hopes were not high enough to get too offended by this game. If you are looking for some way to kill an hour of your day and just happen to have 800 Microsoft Points sitting around, then this is a small diversion.
