et 40 years before the beginning of the original show, Battlestar Galactica puts the player in the role of Adama, the man who will grow up to be the commander of the Galactica. In the game, he is a hotshot young viper pilot assigned to the Blue Wing of Galactica's fighters. The player guides Adama through a series of missions, earning him better and better fighter craft to get him through harder and harder missions against the unending waves of Cylons.
Some of BG puts Adama in a turret in the Galactica, and in other missions he is assigned to different types of craft in the fleet. For most of the game, however, the player will command a Colonial Viper. The Vipers have both lasers and missiles. The lasers can be fired in quick, light bursts, or the fire button can be held for a moment to launch a single, heavy blast. The missiles can also be rapid-fired in clouds, or holding the trigger down makes them launch as homing weapons. The player can adjust the missiles during the missions so that they do less damage over a greater area or greater damage to a smaller area.
Players will quickly find that despite being a space fighter game, the heart of Battlestar is energy management. Everything—firing lasers, launching missiles, speeding up and slowing down the Viper—costs energy. No energy, no bang. Energy regenerates slowly on its own, and when it is at 100 percent the ship begins to repair itself even more slowly. As Adama's Viper takes damage, players will find themselves avoiding shooting so their ship can repair.
Hatch and Benedict are back
The coolest thing about BG is that the colonies haven't been blown up yet, which means they can send multiple battlestars to deal with Cylon threats. It is a warm and comfortable feeling to battle alongside, say, three battlestars and to know that there are friendly ports at which their munitions can all be restocked if needed. This warm feeling would be stronger if the help Adama got from the other Colonial Vipers was more useful. In most of the scenarios, Adama flies with squadron mates, and the game rewards good performance in mission completion by giving Adama extra wingmen. Unfortunately, none of these units fights as well as the Cylons. The wingmen are better than the squadron boys, but both die very quickly once combat starts.
More damaging to the gameplay is the inability to save during a mission. On top of that, even though the missions are usually divided into parts, there are no checkpoints. If 15 minutes of hard flying results in Adama's death just short of the mission's completion, that means having to play the mission all over from the top. It doesn't help a new player's learning curve that the first mission is one of the hardest and nearly the longest in the game. On the second (and third and fourth) times through it, players will be glad that the first mission is not a tutorial one, but the first time that a player sits down to the game, they will definitely wish there was a tutorial mission to fly.
The game contains voice acting from Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict as well as Kristanna Loken, but none of their performances is worth buying the game for. The Cylons have the best voices, of course, and the humans are bland in comparison. The cutscenes are workmanlike, but they won't blow players away.
Overall, BG is a game that has its virtues, but a couple of simple additions would have made it much less frustrating.
Unlike Crimson Skies, Battlestar Galactica had me over-steering constantly, and I had painfully little luck getting and staying on the tails of the Cylons. Thank goodness for the game's homing missiles or the colonies would have fallen 40 years earlier.
— Eric
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