I had a few things lined up on my to-do list, but I wanted to try something a bit different from the other games I’ve been playing recently. And so, I started playing Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock.

And now I think I might be cursed!

Reminder: For the Year of Gaming Challenge, I have to play one of the many games I’ve bought in Steam sales and never got around to playing. I must give it a fair chance and write up my thoughts by the end of each month. (That may not sound like much of a challenge, but as a father with a lot going on right now, it will be hard to fit in!)

Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock

Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock is a turn-based strategy game developed by Black Lab Games and published by Slitherine Software back in 2017.

The game comes in two parts. There’s an overview layer where story missions and random events occur throughout the four star systems. You can’t respond to everything, and you have to make sure that all the colonies stay in the alliance to continue to receive resources. If too many colonies pull out, it’s game over. You then get into turn-based space battles, where you must manoeuvre your ships around in 3D space to get one over on those pesky Cylons. And it’s fairly competent at both of these parts, at least in the early hours.

It’s also a game that you can no longer buy! The day after I started playing it, the developers announced that as of November 15th 2025 (so by the time this review comes out!) you will no longer be able to purchase the game on any platform.

Just my luck that I would try to get into a game right before it’s discontinued. The last update was in 2020, the last news item in 2022, and then this one, just as I launched it for the first time! So, you can still play it if you own it, but if you’re reading this and are thinking about giving it a try… well, you’re kinda screwed!

It seems that the developers are keen to wash their hands of the thing they created! 😉

Kinda makes this whole exercise feel a bit pointless, but hey, here we are! I committed to the challenge and I shall continue as planned.

Story and Writing

The story is set on the twelve human colonies, after the disappearance of the titular Battlestar Galactica. Your job as fleet commander is to fight the Cylons and keep the human colonies safe. It’s a bit odd to make a BSG game that doesn’t actually feature the Galactica (at least, as far as I’ve played!), but that doesn’t necessarily matter. The characters are all new too, but some have taken inspiration from what I can remember of the TV series.

When you start a campaign, there’s an opening cutscene that was clearly produced on a budget, and then the rest of the story is told mostly through in-game dialogue. It’s mostly pretty well-written, and you always feel like you’re on the back foot against the Cylons. There are alleged squabbling factions and an escalation of Cylon attacks, which you’re told about rather than shown, but the telling is pretty good, for the most part.

Gamplay

The space battles are most reminiscent of Homeworld, except that it’s turn-based. You order your units around, setting their target position and height, telling them who to fire on, and when to launch missiles or deploy fighters. Then end your turn, and both sides’ moves play out in real-time. There are a few nuances to manage: corvettes can only fire forwards, while frigates can only fire side on. Some ships have missiles and there are countermeasures to consider. Also, there are fighters, which are massively overpowered! (But I guess that makes sense in the context of BSG!) The ships can only manoeuvre so far and so fast each turn, and you have to be careful not to end up in a situation where ships collide with each other, or allow the toasters to flank you. It can be fiddly, especially as you have to take height/depth into account, but it mostly works pretty well (especially once you learn to point your ships at where the enemy ship is likely to be during the next turn and not where they are now!).

Between missions, there’s a simple galaxy map, with four star systems and a dozen-or-so planets. You have to build fleets and move them around to respond to Cylon threats and complete story missions. This overview layer reminds me of the recent XCOM games, though it has to be said, it’s not as deep.

I do have a few gripes. It’s weird that you can’t rotate ships at the start of the battle, as sometimes you have to spend a few turns doing a three-point space turn before your fleet can engage the enemy, which is just embarrassing! You also can’t select multiple ships during this phase, like you can during normal combat. There’s also an annoying pause after you issue orders turns while it says “Working…” for a few seconds before you can end your turn. I’m not sure why, but sometimes it takes AGES! This is particularly annoying when you want to take multiple turns in rapid succession, and it slows the already not-always-thrilling gameplay down to a crawl!

I found it quite engaging for the first few hours. But then it felt like every battle was more or less the same. Sometimes you have to protect a civilian ship or destroy a space station. Occasionally, there’s a nebula, which prevents your missiles from targeting enemy ships. There was a mission with some satellites that boosted your stats, but the Cylons ignored them, and so did I! You can increase the power of your fleets by assigning and promoting officers, but you can only ever take 7 ships into any battle. It’s also not clear when your officers are ready to be promoted, so I had to go through each one, clicking the promote button to see if they were ready.

It’s a shame, as with a few tweaks and optimisations, the game could be a lot more fun and engaging, but it seems we’ll never get those fixes now!

Craft

It’s not the most premium-feeling game in the world. It doesn’t feel like a huge leap forward from Homeworld, and that’s a 25-year-old game. There are times when the action pauses in the heat of battle with fighters engaging, lasers and missiles flying in all directions, where the game does look great.

There are attempts to be cinematic, with things like your fleet jumping into the area, but they don’t always work. A  fairly major issue is that the scale feels off. All the ships, including the battlestars and space stations, feel tiny. Not helped by being placed in mostly featureless skyboxes (spaceboxes?), where the stars are too dense and bright, so the ships don’t really stand out from the background. The ships do look good, and are accurate to their designs from the TV series. They all look like realistically similar and modular ships that humans would probably build. But there’s also not a lot of difference between the different ship classes; you can’t easily tell some of them apart at a glance.

As I said, the writing and voice acting are pretty decent; it’s just a shame that that’s the only tool the game seems to have for delivering the story. It just feels like an overly ambitious game, hampered by a relatively low budget. But then, I would have expected a game based on a TV show that had been off the air for eight years (at the time of release) to have the budget it deserved!

Oh, and the game crashed at the end of a mission, about 8 hours in. On one hand, it’s a nearly-10-year-old game; on the other hand, they had three years between launch and the last update in 2020 to fix all the bugs!

Stats

• I got the game for free on Steam in July 2025. It is no longer available on any platform.
• I played it for just over 13 hours and have completed Chapter 9 of the story.
• I probably won’t go back, because by that point, the battles were starting to feel repetitive and I’d lost my immersion in the story.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed my first few hours with BSG: Deadlock, but it became a bit samey and lost its appeal after a while. I’m not sure I can see myself playing much more of it once this month is over, and I didn’t exactly find myself rushing to buy all of the DLC for it before they delisted it all.

Ultimately, the effect of spending a few days playing this game has been twofold: 1) It’s made me want to watch the BSG TV series again – if I can work out what streaming platform the damn thing is on! – and 2) it’s made me want to play Homeworld again!