While it didn’t make much impact at launch, I tip my metaphorical hat to Black Lab Games for supporting Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock until it became the strategy game I always wanted. Today, they launched Sin & Sacrifice, the last expansion of ‘Season One’, adding a new story-heavy campaign, two new ship types, TV-authentic dynamic radio chatter and a free update adding a veterancy system. As well as bundling all the DLC to date into a discounted Season One pack, they’ve announced a second run in the works. Below, a trailer showing off the delightfully crackly radio effects.

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Freespace 2 remains one of the best space combat sims around thanks to its dedicated modding scene, mostly centred around the Hard Light Productions forums. Fans have been polishing up and fine-tuning Volition’s old workhorse for nearly two decades, and have been exceptionally organised about it. Your one-stop shop for space dogfights is now Knossos, a fan-made launcher app just for Freespace 2 mods and free standalone fan-games. Here’s some the best that you can play today, plus a quick guide on where to start for absolute rookies and old aces alike.

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Much as Black Lab have improved on their strategic Battlestar Galactica Deadlock with patches and expansions, until today’s DLC – Anabasis – it lacked the TV show’s sense of looming dread. While the new addon also expands the game’s main strategic campaign, its most exciting feature is a new survival mode inspired by the TV series. An isolated fleet retreats back to Caprica from deep space, pursued constantly by Cylon forces across a random series of losing encounters. Below, a launch trailer fresh enough to make me forget for a moment that the show is 14 years old.

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Some games just take a bit of time to grow into their skin, so to speak. Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock was a decent enough sci-fi strategy game when it first launched, but perhaps felt a little under-baked in places, according to Alec’s review-ish look at it here. After an extra year of polish, patching in new features and the release of a major expansion yesterday, it now feels far more like the game that Battlestar Galactica always deserved.

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To this day, I’m honestly baffled that the Battlestar Galactica revival spawned so few games. It’s a setting that just begs> for it on so many levels, so I’m glad that Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock exists, even if it was over a decade late to the party. This space strategy/tactics adaptation was perhaps a little lightweight at launch, but developers Black Lab Games have been patching, tweaking and tuning it ever since, and are gearing up for the release of its first full expansion: The Broken Alliance.

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During 2004-2006, I probably thought about Battlestar Galactica at least once an hour every single day. Grown-up sci-fi where everyone was at least a bit bad, the space battles felt tangible as well as spectacular and the enemy was as unknowable as they were implacable. And then… well, let’s instead pretend what happened didn’t happen, BSG stayed the BSG we all loved, and some time in the middle of all that we got Battlestar Galactica Deadlock [official site], a ‘simultaneous turn-based’ strategy game that’s all about space battles and space battles alone, and most importantly, missiles do that cool, slow, curvy thing as they fly.

Let’s pretend it happened in 2005 rather than 2017, and this is but a fond look back at a time when everything BSG touched turned to gold. (more…)

Strategy publishers Slitherine have sent word that they’re working on a Battlestar Galactica game. It goes by the name Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock [official site] and is under development at Black Lab Games, creators of 3D tactical fleet battler Star Hammer. Galactica looks to be similarly based around ship-to-ship combat, focusing on the defense of the Twelve Colonies during the first Cylon war. Expect fleet building as well as tactical combat, and characters old and new. It’s coming this summer and you’ll find more details and a trailer below.

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