Battlestar Galactica Deadlock was a moderately well-received naval strategy game that was unfortunately delisted last year. No official reason was given for the delisting but the general assumption is that the rights expired and either the rights holders or the developers didn’t choose to renew. The lack of communication about exactly what happened plus the recent release of Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes has led many in the BSG community to turn their ire on Scattered Hopes and its developer Alt Shift of Crying Suns fame, saying that Deadlock died for “a cheap, shallow, ugly mobile game.” This is unfair for numerous reasons, least of all calling something a “mobile game” just because they’re not informed enough to know what stylized graphics from an indie developer look like. As such I’m writing this to give a more nuanced take on Scattered Hopes as both a fan of the show and my never ending dream of another space roguelike like FTL.
Scattered Hopes exists in the same Battlestar Galactica universe as the early 2000s show, with the Cylons (a race of machines that were originally created by mankind) destroying almost the entirety of human civilization in a day. In the show Commander Adama leads a ragtag civilian fleet from the titular battlestar-class warship Galactica with the promise of taking them to the one human colony not destroyed by the Cylons: a planet called Earth. In Scattered Hopes you do not play as Adama or even command Galactica, instead it puts you in command of one of many gunstars (a smaller class of warship, ironically made “canon” in Deadlock) with a few other surviving civilian ships in a desperate attempt to regroup with the relative “safety” of Galactica and her fleet.
This set up has several advantages, primarily that it doesn’t fully spoil the events of a show that you should definitely watch. So while it’s not beholden to the events of the TV show it still can hit the same sort of story beats while being “your own” experience per run, which I’ve been told can be an appealing point of roguelikes. For example, a key point of the early 2000s BSG is that the Cylons find a way to create human spies/saboteurs and in every Scattered Hopes run you’ll be tasked with weeding out the Cylon in your ranks as they try to destroy the fleet. This process can take a while and is honestly a bit cumbersome, but the story created by these moments is where the fun comes from as your best pilot, XO, etc suddenly turns out to have been an enemy the whole time. Taking it a step further, if they seem genuinely apologetic/loyal towards humankind you can let them out and then have a Cylon on your team, though the rest of your crew may not approve, leading to further gameplay challenges down the road.
The main way Scattered Hopes embraces the atmosphere of Battlestar Galactica is through the combat. The Cylons are everywhere and cannot be stopped, only avoided or delayed, and to that end combat generally takes the form of two minute long defensive battles. After a certain number of events a Cylon capital ship will jump in and bombard you with missiles and fighter craft that you have to destroy or distract until your FTL computer finishes its calculations to jump the fleet to the next safe area. Your ship comes with its own weapons of course, normally missiles, nukes, and large area of effect flak cannons, but these are on long cooldowns and are meant more to attack large groups while the primary source of your fleet’s defense comes from your own fighter craft (much like the show!). Combat is real-time but can be paused at any point like FTL and Crying Suns, and you’ll spend the two minutes positioning your fighters around the map to intercept the Cylon ships and missiles coming your way before you have to recall the ships in a mad dash back to the gunstar before your two minutes are up.
The strategy here is very simplistic on paper but gets deeper the more you get into it. Initially it’s a relatively basic positional game, where you just have to move your ships towards where the enemy ships are going to spawn or into the path of missiles so you can destroy them. Your fighters have their own strengths and weaknesses, with the primary considerations being range and speed, but as you get further into the game it becomes less about catching enemies and instead letting the enemies come to you. Maybe you could swoop over to where a swarm of raiders will be spawning on the top of the map but the Cylon capital ship is queuing up a round of nukes it will be shooting down the middle. If you don’t have any other ships that can handle the nukes it’s obviously better to pull back a shorter ranged ship like a viper to handle it, but there can be many factors at play in the decision making. The type of enemy ships can also make and break these moments, as there are many types of Cylons with various levels of weapon range, damage, durability, and passives like cloaking devices and laying mines. Fortunately you can see the kind of enemies that are going to warp in before they arrive, which makes these choices a little easier.
What is less fortunate is the design of some of these enemies. This being a roguelike you’re occasionally at the mercy of RNG and certain ship combinations can just feel unfair. A particular point of frustration are the enemies with high dodge chance, as you’ll be attacking swarms of these foes and just not doing any damage to them while they shred your fighters and then your civilian defenses. Cloaking isn’t much better since they just are immune to anything except area of effect abilities, but at least you can bait the cloaked units into attacking to break their defense or hit them with your capital ship weapons. Dodge units? There really isn’t a strategy other than “gang up on them” which only negates the dodge chance with certain ships, or “hope your attacks land” and much like RNG critical hits in other games it can lead to a lot of frustration if you keep missing attacks or there’s a dozen of these enemies on the field at once. Admittedly you also have your own dodge chances for your units, but it’s cute when friendly units do it and they never hit the same levels as certain enemy swarms. It just feels imbalanced and poorly designed is my point, and I’d prefer difficult enemies with a long lifespan to be more health-based than RNG based. It’d be the exact same situation in terms of battle length but feel more like you’re making progress than failing based on percentages.
Something else that feels relatively poorly balanced are the ship classes. Scattered Hopes only has four gunstars to choose from for runs which feels very limited compared to something like FTL (to be fair Slay the Spire also only has four classes) but makes up for it by having the ships have far more unique passive abilities. There’s the starting ship with discounts for repairs and the others deal more damage at a distance, heal fighters when docked during combat, or have increased damage based on debuffs applied to enemies. While these passives might seem like the big draw for these gunstars, the real make or break for these runs are the support craft that come along with them in the fleet. The starter ship comes with some helpful craft that produce additional resources while all the other gunstars don’t come with anything as consistently helpful. As such you’ll feel immediately and painfully starved for resources at every turn compared to the world of plenty you have with the starter ship, to the point that the game feels like it’s balanced AROUND the starter ship more than the others. I’m more than willing to accept that I’m just bad at the game but it feels more like the developers truly intended the whole game to hinge on all but the starter ships finding the resource generating fleets early in runs. I suppose it’s not unheard of in roguelikes, for example much of Slay the Spire hinges on getting energy relics, but it still feels like a poor design that one gunstar appears to outclass the others when it comes to being beholden to lucky fleet drops.
When you aren’t in combat Scattered Hopes has between-combat safe zones where you can search the neighboring areas of space for resources, repair your ships, chat with the crew, and deal with crises when they arise. Unlike FTL where you can linger as long as you like between jumps, Scattered Hopes only gives you eight “turns” been combats and it’s your choice on how to spend them. Every challenge during this period, be it resource gathering or disarming Cylon bombs, can be accomplished either by spending resources or assigning one of your crew members to handle it instead. The crew assignments are usually the best choice and yield better rewards, but you can only use them so many times in each area so you have to make tough decisions about how to utilize them.
The crises I’ve been mentioning are random events that usually happen at least once per sector and almost always present you with two choices: either you complete a series of challenges with your crew or by spending tons of resources, or you pick an option that basically reads “ignore the problem” at the cost of a debuff that affects you for several battles or other negative effects. Generally there is no “wrong” answer here and rewards like increased fleet morale, secret unique battles, and crew experience can be gained if you complete the crisis proper. Again, it comes down to your own decision making and which negative event you think you can endure, and usually a mix of both strategies is best, but it just adds to more of the “tough choices as it’s all coming down around us” atmosphere that BSG is all about.
While I do have issues with the crisis system it mostly comes down to my own personal bias towards repetitive roguelike systems and some mechanical problems. As a run grinds on the crises become less of a “troubling obstacle to overcome as you question what you’re willing to sacrifice to survive” and more “oh god another one of these things lets get it over with.” In some ways this is just a flaw of the system of roguelikes themselves where the terrible becomes the mundane through repetition, but Scattered Hopes doesn’t help matters by having crises able to repeat themselves multiple times during the same run. Twice during my first run I had the same crisis that forced me to lock down one of my fighter docks, with the exact same dialogue and other factors, which was disappointing. Part of this comes from being “too good” at the game, as certain crises come up when the fleet’s various factions love or hate you, so if you manage to keep everything at an even keel you will have less horrible crises raining down on your head. But on the other hand you’ll miss out on some unique battles and apparently have to suffer from a potential lack of variety in your events, which of course then ties into further repetition on future runs because you’re just looping through the same forty-odd crises on repeat. Your crew can also get their own quests based on their morale levels for sweet rewards, but even if the quest has a different name it’s always plays out in a nearly identical manner: resolve two events with them and then have them run a combat mission or two. It all gets a little draining.
Those fleet factions tend to be handled during brief events that interrupt you while you are doing other things in-between battles. One of your crew will pop in and ask you to make a snap judgment on a situation which normally involves propping up one faction at the cost of another. The military is trying to crack down on the underworld, for example, and if you support the military in this effort the underworld will get mad at you and vice versa. Support one side too much and it will get overly bold and start bullying the other factions, but if you push over another faction too often it’ll start trying to blow up the fleet to spite you. The game is too simple to offer any ability to negotiate with or completely destroy a given faction, so your best bet is to keep everyone at a middle ground which somewhat frustratingly is less interesting than things going wrong, from a game content perspective.
What’s also frustrating with these events is just how they are CONSTANTLY interrupting you. Scattered Hopes is not a game with short, 30 minutes or less runs like in roguelikes of Hades, Slay the Spire, or Balatro fame. This is the world of FTL where runs can take 90 minutes or more, and after a run or two (or even within a run that goes the distance) there can be a natural inclination/drive to push through the downtime areas and get back into the combat to progress. But then every two actions you take there’s another event that throws off your tempo and pulls you onto your bridge or the hanger or just a character pops up in front of you asking you to throw another fleet faction under the bus. I get it, it’s meant to illustrate the constant pressure you’re under trying to hold the last remnants of humanity together, and I’m sympathetic to using gameplay mechanics to create atmosphere and feelings in players. That being said does being interrupted every 45 seconds to pick option A or B really have a place in a video game genre that is designed around constant repetition?
Said repetition does get reduced slightly thanks to cues Scattered Hopes has taken from games such as Hades and Slay the Spire to help with the replayability. There’s the “Favors” system that is similar to the mirror or arcana cards in Hades, where completing certain actions awards points that can be used to unlock bonuses for future runs. These bonuses range from being able to restart battles (“extra lives”), additional starting resources, or higher rarity unlocks when characters or ships gain levels, and they’re all obviously beneficial to making at least the early game easier much like the ones in Hades. From Slay the Spire there’s “extinction” levels, additional difficulty levels after you complete a run with a given kind of gunstar, just like the higher level difficulty ascensions in Slay the Spire. Scattered Hopes hasn’t been out long enough and isn’t popular enough for anyone to have written out a list of all the extinction modifiers, but level 1 starts with civilian ships being added to your fleet at lower health and will probably get worse from there. This plus the four different types of ships you can play with in theory creates up to forty-four “unique” successful runs, never mind how often you’ll die to Cylons putting bombs on your ships or enemies fighter craft with unlimited dodges. Granted it’s a far cry from Slay the Spire‘s twenty ascension levels or Hades infinite combinations of modifiers, but it’s something.
I’ve been bashing onScattered Hopes throughout this review for its irregularly balanced enemy/ship designs, poorly thought-out interruptions during downtime activities, repetitive game events, and less starting ships than I would expect to be playable. Taking all that for what it is, I do still like playing the game. Even if I wasn’t such a huge fan of the franchise (though that certainly helps) I find the positional ship combat engaging, the last second escapes exhilarating in small doses, and it feels like the story that they’re building within the formula of a roguelike game is worth exploring. That being said I am not a huge fan of the roguelike genre and the limited variety in Scattered Hopes compared to something like Slay the Spire, Hades, or even Into the Breach really has worn me down. Additionally something did happen while playing the game that soured me on Scattered Hopes so badly that I’ve been counting the seconds until Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II releases so I can play something else instead. I leave you with this story from my second run in the game, and the message that Scattered Hopes has decent atmosphere, somewhat unique gameplay, and occasionally exciting “escaping by the skin of your teeth” moments, but if high amounts of repetition bothers you I wouldn’t recommend it. As they say in the show: “All of this has happened before. And it will happen again.”
I had gotten far enough into my second run to trigger the hidden Cylon to start sabotaging the fleet and began my investigation. As I said before the investigation mechanics into the hidden Cylons are not well explained, but the basics are that you can reveal two to three hidden traits about members of your crew once per downtime (the first stage of that is shown below), and as you gather this information two primary subjects will be uncovered. Upon identifying the suspects you can either investigate them directly or throw them in the brig, where they will be passively interrogated and reveal more information about themselves over time. The longer it takes you to identify the Cylon the more bomb-threats and injured civilians they’ll create, so it’s important to find them if only so that you aren’t overwhelmed by having to deal with additional events.
I identified the two possible suspicious characters relatively quickly and threw one of them into the brig. Shortly after another bomb threat manifested, which naturally made me suspect that I had chosen the wrong person to arrest. For the sake of balance Scattered Hopes is one of those “you can’t just keep rotating people in and out of jail” games, so my jailbird had to stay there while we diffused the bomb and fought another Cylon capital ship. Post-battle I pulled her out of jail and threw the other suspect in jail, certain that would be the end of it… only for another act of Cylon sabotage to happen shortly after. You can probably see where this is going. My first guess eventually turned out to be correct, but the Cylon had been able to keep sabotaging the fleet despite being locked in prison.
I don’t use the term “unforgivable” very often, but this really upset me. I ran to the Discord server and saw several other players experienced this too which made it seem more like an oversight in design than an actual bug, though the devs did say they’d look into it. You could make the argument that the Cylon investigation mechanics make it “easy” to identify two possible subjects which means it would be “easy” to figure out who the Cylon is by first locking down one suspect and then the other to see when the bomb threats stop. And you’d be right, but that’s a failure in the design of the investigation mechanics and it shouldn’t undermine the way logical reasoning works. If that really was the intent then they shouldn’t have called it the brig before you identify the Cylon and instead called it “advanced interrogation” or something to really drill down on suspects without them being properly arrested. However, given the developer response it does seem like an oversight rather than an intentional design decision, which makes me question why this wouldn’t have been seen as a narrative problem while it was being developed. For me personally this experience and lacking mechanic will be a shadow looming over Scattered Hopes, and it’s likely I won’t touch it again until it’s corrected.
