Earlier this year it was announced that a Perth-based studio, of all places, was making a new Battlestar Galactica game. It wasn’t a mobile spin-off or a small project, but a fully fledged 3D strategy tactics game where humans command their fleet against the brunt of a Cylon attack.
Called Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, the developers finally showed off some gameplay in a livestream this week.
If you’ve played Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, you’ll immediately be familiar with the overarching structure. The player has a series of ships at their command. As ships move across the field you set their positioning, rotation, and you’ll manage their firing arcs, special abilities, and generally manoeuvring them around to target the weakest points of your enemy.
It’s a simultaneous turn-based game, much like Frozen Synapse or more recently, Atlas Reactor.
Like Armada, the game takes place on a level plane. According to the stream, the Perth-based studio found during prototyping that players found it vastly more difficult to comprehend their movement options on a 3D playing field, as opposed to if the playing field was flat.
Each stream has a range of armour values for the front, sides, rear, top and bottom, as well as the hull and the systems on each ship. At around 26 minutes, the stream then switches to a Skirmish mode where users can select a points limit for each side, the map and the makeup of each team:
The full stream is embedded below. I’m not surprised that Deadlock rolled with this style of gameplay – it makes an awful lot of sense for a BSG game. I’ll be keen to see how the singleplayer campaign shakes out, since that undoubtedly ends up being the main drawcard of games like these. For reference: the game is based on the 2003 BSG series, although the game takes place in the time of the First Cylon War.
Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is due out in the Australian winter. There will be a few beta phases run between now and then, with players able to test out the game’s multiplayer.
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4 responses to “Here’s Some Gameplay From That Australian Battlestar Galactica Game”
It’s the Australian winter now however it is not Christmas.
It’s fixed!
“due out in the Australian winter, or around the Christmas holidays.”
ummm… which one is it?
I misspelt a thing