Each mission comes with plenty of story dialogue before, during, and after the operation. Characters you've come to know throughout the lengthy campaign reach the end of their arcs along with the war itself. If you're a fan of BSG and have read up on the lore, you'll be happy to know that many tidbits from the mini-series prequel "Razor" are tied into the final missions here. The story ends on a rather somber note, as is appropriate given what happens later in the BSG world. As the player, you know that you have come up a bit short, and some of the characters seem to sense this as well. The Cylon "super weapon" hinted at throughout the story gets away, dooming mankind to the events seen in the opening hours of BSG the show.
While many of the missions in the campaign boil down to wiping out the enemy fleet, many of them have some kind of objective to accomplish as well, and one towards the end even has a fun gimmick that forces you to manage your fleet much differently than normal. Given that this is the home stretch of the game, it's no surprise that every battle here is a massive slugfest between the best ships you can muster and hordes of Cylons. With just about every option in the game unlocked at this point, and plenty of resources to go around, you have free reign to organize your tactics as you see fit. I enjoyed trying out some of the various munitions I had ignored previously, and of course seeing how things would go if I equipped a nuke in every available slot (hint: things get messy).
The turn-based space combat still holds strong after years of playing it off and on again. It always feels good to pull together a clean attack the knocks out one enemy ship after another while minimizing your own losses. You have to remain vigilant, as getting lax and allowing a ship to cruise head on into the enemy's guns or torpedoes can get it killed in a single turn.
In addition to the Armistice story DLC, the finale also features the "Modern Ships" pack. These ships don't appear in the story campaign, but instead are available for skirmish and multiplayer modes. These ships fully tie the game into the era of BSG the show, featuring the sleek Cylon basestars of that era and the Mercury class Battlestars (like the Pegasus seen in the show).
The game also received a free update for all users, the Daybreak Update which you can see all the details of here. Besides a number of quality of life and visual/performance improvements, the update adds a Photography mode for getting those nifty sci-fi screenshots, and new modes for multiplayer and bigger fleet caps.
I've been a fan of this game for years now, and it was great to play out the conclusion of the story. Fans of the show and fans of tactical combat games should certainly check it out if they haven't yet, as it really is so much better than one might ever expect from a TV show based game that came out many years after hype for the show died down. The developers, Black Lab Games, can be proud of what they've done here, and I look forward to seeing what they do next.
Battlestar Galactica Deadlock and all of its content can be found at the usual storefronts, as well as directly from Slitherine Games.
- Joe Beard
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