The Twelve Colonies of Kobol have constructed robotic servitors, the Cylons, to improve their quality of life. But the Cylons, gaining self-awareness and knowledge of their status as slaves, have rebelled, fleeing into deep space to build a formidable war machine. The Colonial Fleet has been commissioned to deal with the threat, but political infighting amongst the Colonies undermines its operational efficiency. As the Cylons gain an upper hand, the Colonial Fleet learns of divisions amongst the Cylons themselves. As it seeks victory, the Fleet deploys its ultimate weapon: the Jupiter-class battlestar, foremost amongst which is a ship named Galactica.
Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is a 2017 space strategy game developed by Black Lab Games and published by Slitherine. It is based the rebooted Battlestar Galactica TV show which aired on SyFy from 2003 to 2010, spanning a mini-series, four TV seasons, three TV/DVD movies and a spin-off show, Caprica, which lasted for a single season. I reviewed the original game in isolation here, but for this review I replayed the original game and then all of the (extensive) expansions.
Deadlock plays as the product of an unholy but compelling union between the Homeworld and XCOM franchises. The game is set during the First Cylon War, starting about fifty-two years before the events of the original TV show and, through the original campaign and the five story-based expansions, spans the twelve years of the conflict. The player has control of both the strategic and tactical layers of the war, at least to start with. Through an operations control room on the Daidalos Shipyard, you can build new ship and fleets, research and equip new technologies, and order fleets into battle via a strategic map of the Twelve Colonies. Ignore the Cylon threat for too long and they will occupy entire planets, and their funding will be cut off until you can mount a costly liberation operation.
At any time you'll usually have a plethora of side-missions to choose from, variations on defending civilian ships or stations from Cylon attack, engaging Cylon forces in a full-on battle or taking out enemy targets like resupply depots or flagships. Main story missions will usually have more elaborate goals and will feature bespoke voice acting and writing. These missions push forwards the overall strategic course of the war as well as developing the characters.
If Deadlock has a main weakness, it's that the voice acting and dialogue is a little weak, and the game has a weird insistence on making the new characters relatives of established characters from the mythos. Having Admiral Cain's aunt hanging out with Helo's grandmother never feels anything other than random. The game does have more fun when Doc Cottle shows up as a young medic, still as outspoken and grumpy as ever. Oddly the game is more reluctant to have Adama show up in the later missions, despite him canonically serving on Galactica at that point. The story itself, as in the general thrust, is very good and gives you a good idea on how the Cylons didn't simply curb-stomp the Colonies during the original war despite their apparent superiority. One weakness is that the game doesn't explain things that happened during the TV show, so if you're playing this solely as a video game on its own merits, there are a few abrupt plot turns that can feel very random without the context of the show.
The actual gameplay loop starts off very compelling: sending fleets into battle, liberating captured colonies and outposts, and pushing back a Cylon thrust in one sector is all very satisfying, especially when deploying early-game, inferior ships and having to cannily use terrain (gas pockets, asteroid fields) or special weapons to overcome usually superior enemy numbers. The strategic metagame is more XCOM than Total War though, with more of a general push of battle rather than deploying forces in detail. Once you've pushed the Cylons back into the Helios Alpha system, the nearest Colonial point to Cylon territory, it's easy to prevent further breakouts into the rest of the Colonies.
The actual space battles are very satisfying. The game is turn-based, although a twist here is that you and the enemy issue orders simultaneously, and you can't tell what orders the enemy are giving. The game then advances time in 10-second chunks with the consequences of your orders now shown, before pausing again to allow you to give orders. Your capital ships have different features, such as direct-fire main guns which fire automatically depending on what enemy ships are in which firing arcs (you can also nominate a target to focus fire on), a variety of missiles (from target-tracking warheads to dumb-fire torpedoes to nukes) and smaller ships to deploy, usually squadrons of Vipers and Raptors. Vipers are very capable, especially when you get the Mk. II variant halfway through the game, and judicious use of them to take out Cylon Raiders, shoot down incoming ordinance and then attack enemy capital ships en masse can make your battles much easier than they first appear.
The graphics are great (for 2017), even if your ships generally feel quite "small," but seeing the recoil as a battlestar's main ordinance engages enemy ships and missiles roar off never gets old. Vipers and Raiders are scaled correctly, so are quite hard to see during battles themselves and you have to rely on unit symbols. Particularly fun is when the battle is over and the game auto-generates a realtime playback of the battle, using dynamic camera angles, documentary-style crash-zooms and so on which all make them look like the space battles from the TV show (the game also allows you to upload particularly cool-looking battles to YouTube, if you wish, though this gets spotty with 4K playbacks).
A weakness of the gameplay loop is that once heavier ships are available, the need to fight side-battles as well as the main story missions becomes fairly predictable. In the latter half of the main storyline, you can find yourself trying to get through main story missions whilst a secondary fleet handles side-missions, normally by just using the exact same tactics each time (launch Vipers, send them to take care of business for you, put up flak screens, destroy lighter, faster enemy ships when they catch up). This can get a little grindy.
The original game is solid and mostly satisfying, despite something of a cliffhanger ending, but the DLC expands the scope of the game enormously. Given most of my review of the original game stands, it might be more useful here to focus on these expansions in order of release.
Reinforcement Pack (2017)
This expansion adds a bunch of new ships, including the Berzerk carrier, which is sometimes useful in early game battles but quickly loses viability compared to battlestars. The Janus heavy cruiser, which is effectively a missile frigate, is much more useful throughout the game and its expansions. The Cylon Phobos and Cerastes are gunships that don't do enough to differentiate themselves from the existing Nemesis-class, through, whilst the mines introduced in this DLC are more annoying than useful.
Broken Alliance (2018)
Broken Alliance works a bit like the old Enemy Within DLC for XCOM: Enemy Unknown. It's an "add-on" for the original campaign. Recognising that the original campaign could be a bit monotonous, this expansion adds an eight-mission side-campaign where the attempt to bring together the Twelve Colonies to sign the Articles of Colonisation is undermined by traitors and saboteurs, resulting in Colonial-on-Colonial battles. It's a solid story with some twists and turns, and it adds a much more useful array of ships to the game: the Minerva-class battlestar is an improvement over the Artemis-class light battlestar of the base game and a much more capable escort to your Jupiters; the Celestra support ship is a fun way to reinforce friendly units; Assault Raptors add massive missile pods to the standard Raptor, allowing it to become a more potent threat to Cylon heavy ships; and the Argos-class basestar is a more formidable Cylon flagship. This DLC is required, I think, to make the base game more enjoyable.
Anabasis (2018)
The most interesting and experimental of the expansions, Anabasis is a persistent fleet campaign which makes the game play more like Homeworld, and draws on both the original and rebooted TV shows for inspiration. Your fleet consists of warships and civilian vessels. You jump to a star system, pick up more civilian ships and then have to fight your way clear of the Cylons before jumping to the next target. Damage is not repaired beyond what limited ad hoc repairs you can carry out on the fly. Eventually you'll get home or be destroyed in the process. This is a customisable survival mode where you can decide on difficulty, what ships you have etc and score points for how many enemy ships are destroyed and how many civilians you get home. This mode interfaces with later DLC, like the Modern Ships Pack, allowing you to have Mercury-class battlestars like the Pegasus join the fight. This game also adds twelve new side-mission types to the base game, improving its variability immensely. For hardcore fans, this is a must-play.
Sin and Sacrifice (2019)
The first story-based expansion to the game, this is set after the base campaign and introduces a new Cylon general who is a more formidable opponent than the Cylons in the base game. The Colonials have to fight off this commander's more canny attempts to destroy the Twelve Colonies. The DLC also expands the repertoire of battle chatter and adds the Colonial Heracles gunship and the Cylon Gorgon support carrier to the game. The eleven-mission story expansion is pretty good, though suffering from some of the same grindy issues as the base game, and controls the same way.
Resurrection (2019)
Resurrection changes the gameplay of the series significantly. Rather than fighting on the map of the Twelve Colonies and organising battles from the strategy centre of the mobile Daidalos Shipyard, you're now based permanently in the CIC of Galactica, which, in a nice-if-pointless twist, you can now walk around. This is a perfect 3D replica of the set from the TV show, and is very impressive. The ten-mission campaign, set three years after Sin and Sacrifice, sees the Galactica being upgraded for a new phase of the war, as the Cylons seek to split the Twelve Colonies to more easily destroy them.
A welcome feature here is that you can play new story mission sequentially, whilst playing side-missions only to drop the Cylon threat level and make the story missions easier. This allows you to focus on getting through the story with less distractions, whilst still allowing you to fight side-battles and level up your officers and crews. The DLC adds the Jupiter Mk. II battlestar to the fleet, along with the Cylon Cratus-class basestar. Both sides also get heavy bombers to augment their fleets, if you're okay with micro-managing them. This expansion refreshes the gameplay just when it really needs it.
Ghost Fleet Offensive (2020)
Set several years after the previous campaign, this ten-mission story sees the Colonies secretly pooling together a "Ghost Fleet" behind Cylon lines to deliver a devastating blow to their command structure which will hopefully end the war. The new Cylon commander Atropos is close to overwhelming the Colonies' defences and besieging the planets, so the mission takes on fresh urgency. This DLC interfaces chronologically with the Blood & Chrome DVD and introduces the Orion-class frigate from that movie, along with the Colonial Defender and Cylon Medusa. The main story in this one is pretty good, but the new ships are underwhelming.
Modern Ships Pack (2020)
This DLC adds several ships from the timeframe of the TV series to the game. These cannot be used in the story campaigns (which would not make any sense) but can be used in skirmish, multiplayer and the Anabasis mode. The ships included are the Mercury-class battlestar, the Valkyrie-class support battlestar, Colonial Viper Mk. VII, the modern Cylon basestar, the Guardian basestar and the Modern Raider. If you want to see the familiar ships from the TV show, this is a must-have, but is otherwise unnecessary to follow the story.
Armistice (2020)
The final expansion adds an eight-mission campaign which sees the Galactica crew confront their old enemy-turned-ally-turned-enemy, the Cylon scientist Clothos, for the final time. They learn of the existence of a powerful Cylon weapon and track it down to a remote planet where they join forces with the battlestar Columbia in Operation Raptor Talon (the events of which are chronicled in the BSG spin-off movie Razor). This has the most satisfying storyline of the expansions, as it moves directly towards ending the war once and for all, even if the precise events of the final mission don't fully make sense unless you've already seen the TV show.
When combined into one complete package, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is a formidably impressive package. Sixty story missions and an effectively infinite pool of side missions create a campaign that will easily take you over 60 hours to complete. The Anabasis survival/challenge mode is highly replayable and customisable. There are also multiplayer and skirmish modes, and an adjustable difficulty level, as well as different tactics to employ. There is a reasonable variety of ships and weapons to experiment with.
That said, there's still a degree of repetition and grind involved, though far less than on release; Black Lab Games should be congratulated on their exemplary post-release support that took a fairly bare-bones original title and has since fleshed it out into a very comprehensive game. In particular removing the mission choice map is a counter-intuitive move which improves the game tremendously in the later DLC.
The main question is price: the Complete Edition is eyebrow-raisingly expensive, with the original game and the DLC all still being sold permanently at full price. The full package will set you back £90. It's a good game but it's not that good. Fortunately, Deadlock and its DLC are frequently on sale and I've seen the Complete Package go for under £30, which is much more sensible (note that the BattleTech Mercenary Collection has the exact same problem, going for a bonkers £75 when not on sale).
Assuming you can get it for a decent price, Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock (****) is an engrossing and rewarding space tactics game, with a good story, interesting unit variety and a formidable amount of content. The voice acting and dialogue could be stronger, but for a low-budget product this is very polished and enjoyable, and for established BSG fans, it has added value in fleshing out ideas the TV show could only hint at. The game is available now on PC (via Steam and GoG), Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
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