Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes Resurrects This Series As A Promising Strategy Roguelike

By Elijah Gonzalez | August 19, 2025 | 2:00pm

Video Games Features Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes

Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes Resurrects This Series As A Promising Strategy Roguelike

If you hadn’t heard the news, Dotemu just announced Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, a strategy roguelike based on the legendary TV show that’s headed for PC. If this announcement caught you off guard, you wouldn’t be alone. On the one hand, Battlestar is one of the most well-known sci-fi series in recent memory. On the other, this program hasn’t been on the air since 2009 and isn’t exactly at the forefront of the cultural conscience. While Peacock had been working on a follow-up, Variety reported last year that development had been shelved. In short, this game reveal is quite out of left field.

However, this distance between the game and the show comes with a benefit: it makes it much less likely that this would be a quick-to-market licensed game intended to cash in on the “brand’s” popularity. Instead, based on my 70 minutes or so of hands-on time with Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, this seems to be the case of a license-holder going out of its way to find a studio that’s a sensible fit.

Alt Shift’s last game, Crying Suns, was a tactical rogue-lite where you played as a space commander searching the stars. As it so happens, Scattered Hopes has a similar premise, even as it fits into an existing space opera. You play as the leader of a group of survivors looking to link up with Commander Adama’s Battlestar Galactica after the Cylons (robots created by humanity) carry out their devastating attack that wipes out the vast majority of human life.

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To find Adama, you’ll need to make a series of FTL jumps, fighting off waves of invaders for two real-world minutes until the engines are ready for takeoff. The game has two main phases: in the first, you prepare for your upcoming battle by making tough decisions about resources, upgrades, and which political factions to appease. In the second, you carry out the previously described battles, all so you can inch closer and closer to the Galactica and the other survivors.

As for the first phase, it plays very much like a board game, or more specifically, like a Eurogame. Basically, you juggle a variety of resources, all with the ultimate goal of leaving your fleet best prepared for future battles. There’s fuel, which you need to make jumps and partake in “Positive Situations,” which can grant other resources. There are supplies, which are primarily used to resolve “Negative Situations,” which will take away resources if unresolved. There are nukes, which you use to, you know, nuke guys. And lastly, there’s scrap, which is primarily used to buy from the shop and bankroll upgrades from the R&D department.

Each turn, you have a choice of performing one major action, which includes dealing with a positive or negative situation, training your crew, or inefficiently scraping up resources through recycling. You also have VIP characters who can help you with these tasks, either allowing you to spend fewer resources or earn more of them, depending on what they’re being used to do. Mixed in are crises that will force you to align with different factions, which can then impact future events.

If that sounds like there’s a lot going on, again, it’s much like a good board game where, after being barraged with a whole bunch of info upfront via the tutorial, the rules don’t feel overwhelming once you understand how everything works. From what I played, this phase did a good job capturing the sense that you could always use more time, giving the decisions you’re constantly making a sense of weight. Do you use your scrap to create a new dock that will let you deploy multiple units, at the cost of not being able to pay striking workers the scrap needed to meet their demands? Who do you assign to which mission? How do you plan out your next jump location to best make use of the resources you have and those you need?

There are so many choices that it doesn’t take long to see how runs can branch in countless directions, especially because you will constantly be dealing with randomized events and crises that can take things down dramatically different paths. It all seems to strike a balance between giving a sense of agency while also creating a specific sort of tension that comes from not having enough room to do everything you want, forcing you into compelling decisions. Oh, and being Battlestar, there’s also the constant threat that one of your trusted VIP characters could actually be a Cylon in disguise, causing you to question every conversation with your closest crew.

As for the other phase, these space fights with Cylons are even more nerve-racking and require careful management of your limited units, or things will end in disaster. Here, you begin with only two fighter ships, which you use to defend your mothership and its two accompanying civilian vessels. You command your units on where to move and which targets to go after with mouse clicks, while also controlling the mothership’s weapon systems.

Thankfully, you can also pause the action at any time to get a feel for the battlefield. You also get advanced warning when new Cylon ships are going to appear and which unit types they will be, letting you deploy your high-speed fighters, long-ranged snipers, and aggro pulling heavyweights in the correct positions.

However, even with these abilities, the difference between having things in control and spiraling is quite narrow, leading to tense battles. While the actual actions you’re choosing between are pretty simple—at least in the demo, you’ll start out commanding only two units—each little choice can have a ripple effect, and if you send a specific unit against a mismatched target, they can get iced in seconds. That’s not to mention the projectiles constantly targeting your fleet or unforgiving design choices, like how your nukes can wipe out allies as well as enemies. Perhaps the best part of these dogfights, though, was that you could very much feel the ramifications of pre-skirmish decisions, whether it was upgrades you purchased in the previous phase that gave an advantage or regrets over which VIP units you assigned to which ship.

If I had a couple of issues, though, they did come during these enemy encounters. First off, I ran into a rather serious bug where one of my ships gained a “negative” movement speed, making it so that when I ordered them to advance at the beginning of the fight, they zoomed backwards off-screen at the speed of light. While mildly hilarious, this made them unavailable for the entirety of an already-tough encounter, spelling my doom—it’s not exactly the best way for your first run to end. That said, this being a preview, these are the exact kind of issues that can very much be ironed out before release, and while something to keep an eye on, there’s no reason to believe this kind of thing won’t get fixed ahead of time.

The more fundamental issue I had was the way these skirmishes combined relatively limited options and unforgiving outcomes. Because you only have two troops at the start, with a maximum of five in play at once (after a lot of very expensive upgrading), each unit has massive importance, and one slight misclick can end a run. For instance, at one point, my ships were getting pelted by a sniper hiding behind a wall of mines. While the intended solution seemed to be to use my own long-range fighter, they had unfortunately flown into oblivion due to the previously mentioned bug, and when I tried to have my faster close-ranged unit chase them down, my fighter tripped a mine and died instantly.

Basically, instead of a loss in battle feeling like the accumulation of multiple smaller tactical mistakes, like in more complex strategy games where you’re commanding large armies over a longer time period, the tiny number of units you command makes it so that even a wayward mouse command can end your whole run. While that tension is interesting, it can also feel a bit arbitrary and overly punishing, at least from the limited amount I played.

Still, my time with Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes has me largely encouraged. The many decisions you make before each battle have a great deal of weight, forcing you to juggle political factions, resources, and time so you can best face the Cylon menace. While the skirmishes against these hostile robots had some problems, many of these will likely be debugged, and others may naturally improve as you get deeper into the game’s meta-progression and have more tools at your disposal. As someone who hasn’t thought about Battlestar in years, Scattered Hopes has me interested in returning to this unforgiving fight for survival.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.