I spent last week playing Battlestar Galactica: Shattered Hopes, a video game that is built on a simple premise: what if the TV show's best episode, 33, was also a roguelike video game?
If you've never seen it, 33 is the very first BSG episode, in which a ragtag band of survivors flees an invasion of their home planet by evil robots only to find that, no matter how many times they try to jump to a new star system, 33 minutes after arriving those evil robots are right behind them.
It's a tense, dispiriting opening, and also one that perfectly sets the scene for what's to follow: everyone involved is pushed to the wire with very little rest or help, resources are stretched and sacrifices must be made. So yeah, it's wild that it's taken this long for someone to make (or be allowed to make) an official roguelike version of Battlestar Galactica, because the show practically is the genre.
Shattered Hopes takes place across two sections. The first, and the one you spend most time on, is a strategic overview (above), where for a certain number of turns you need to manage your ships and respond to a never-ending cascade of crises and important decisions, tending to your relationship with various factions in your fleet and scrounging for resources. Every star system you jump to in your journey triggers too many of these for you to ever get to all of them, so you're constantly prioritising and, in true Battlestar fashion, having to live with the wreckage of some very hard decisions (and missed opportunities).
The second is a real-time tactics/tower defence battle (below) where, at the end of every sector, you need to hold off hordes of raiding Cylons long enough for the fleet to jump to safety. It's very simple compared to what you might be hoping for from Battlestar, taking place on a 2D plane and focused more on speed and firepower management than complex Viper tactics. But for a roguelike that's designed for runs to be completed in around two hours it needed to be something quick, so what it sacrifices in complexity it makes up for in breeziness.
I don't want to get too reductive about the game's overall design here, but it's a roguelike, so you will encounter here, in the most competent sense, everything that you would expect from the genre. What elevates Shattered Hopes above so many other shots at FTL's crown is the fact it's such a focused and faithful adaptation of the source material, in ways that mesh with what a roguelike is doing perfectly.
As I've said, the structure of Battlestar Galactica already lends itself to authentic roguelike play, because the show feels like the genre. But this game goes above and beyond to weave the two together in ways that are deeply satisfying for fans of the series. Important interior locations like the CIC, hangar and bridge are represented as isometric, pixel art spaces that look so good they make me wish there was a spin-off adventure game set here. Everything you hear or click makes the same sound as it would on the show. And the feeling of waiting for the last Vipers to land before hurriedly punching the JUMP button and watching your ships blink to safety is one of the most faithful recreations of a television moment I have ever taken part in.
At the risk of committing the cardinal critical sin of saying "fans of [thing] will enjoy this", in this case the strength of the adaptation makes that absolutely true. This is a good roguelike that, for fans of Battlestar Galactica, becomes a great roguelike, and alongside the excellent Deadlock (now sadly no longer available) is easily the best way to enjoy it via the medium of video games.
