Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition

The first few hours of the game are fairly interesting: - learn about special abilities, spend a lot of time choosing new skills, build combos, - develop upgrades for your spaceships, set up your second fleet to help rescue planets and gather resources, - get a couple of funny calls from your neighbours, feud with pirates, accept missions, - develop your starbase, solve power issues, upgrade rooms. And then, well, it's another X hours of the same. You upgrade from Tier 2 to Tier 3 ships, your nominal damage output goes from 234-345 to 456-678, typical enemy health goes from 1500 to 3000...all the numbers get bigger, battles last the same or longer - felt like typical JRPG pseudo-progression. Your alien neighbors fade into the background (calling once per hour maybe), most base upgrades are just incrementing numbers (exceptions in next paragraph) and it all runs fine on zirordax, and at about dozen or so officers it takes an effort to care about them as individuals, not just faceless gofers. I wanted to finish it, but during the endgame I was simply wishing for no more sub-bosses, just to quickly get to the end. What I loved: - different spaceship attacks, especially the ones outside central rock-paper-scissors, with unique effects instead (Torture, Rev Up, Meditation Boost, ...), - personality - background info on officers, quirky aliens, - early exploration & outpost/economy building (although fog of war could make this even more interesting), - unique base upgrades (Hyoid etc.) - but these appeared in endgame and you got all of them easily :(, - that one quest that was not just simple fetch - you needed to find the planet's name, - epic powers. What the game could used more: - ground battles: some of my officers NEVER participated in one, so all these skills were blank nodes on the way to space powers, - using these personality traits (there was...once? something about parents) like bluetext in FTL, - prestige classes, - not-so-random events, - less linear tech

I have discovered around 10 bugs in my playthrough of Lightspeed Edition. I managed to finish the game but its state was affected by reloading->state-rewind bug, which caused loosing any chance to help the allies. I have listed all the bugs here in forums "halcyon 6 lightspeed edition forum", some are game-breaking. As of game itself, it is by no way a strategy, it is like Star Control, but Hypermelee is replaced with combination strikes. The gaming field tries to imitate space strategies, like Ascendancy, but its perfectly linear game with little dynamics. Most of dynamics are given through random events, but their effects are much smaller than for example FTL. Diplomacy does NOT exist in this game, you are only given few choices at few moments. As of today I strongly recommend ignoring it, unless gamebreaking reload bug is fixed. The graphics and music are ok, but music gets layered inside the base, which I think is another bug, that I can imagine causes people to set it on mute. Game development seems to have stopped around 2018, I doubt there will be any fixes. Another half-finished abadonware on properietary cemetery, I think.

This game plays a lot like SNES JRPG titles of old like Final Fantasy but in a space setting. The combat is turn based with each ship class having different abilities you can level up that combo with other class abilities. And there are heals and buffs as well. You spend some time resource gathering and building up your base and researching tech to progress to certain story milestone missions and events. That's essentially the whole game in a nut shell. It doesn't have a ton of replay value to me, but the art is cool and the mechanics work well enough, even if it's not a deep strategy title. The only thing I really hated about it was the ground combat. It's incredibly lackluster and also difficult, as you'll likely not want to devote a lot of resources to it. Overall a good fun game.

There are plenty of great reviews of Halcyon 6 praising the game for all it does well. Instead of just echoing the same words, I'd like to add my own thoughts and perspective. I was drawn to Halcyon 6 because of its charming art style, not sure if I could even play it. I am very bad at strategy games and 4X, although I like what the genre bring to the table. As other reviews stated, Halcyon 6 simplifies the 4X aspect of the game to a minimum which is good, but I still feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things I can do, questioning what would be the best to do. Especially in the beginning, everything seems important: Upgrading the base, automating outposts, researching upgrades, building new ships and you always seem short of resources and personnel. Luckily the game provides a large selection of difficulty modes, the easiest being rather forgiving so that you can experiment with the mechanics and see what works out the best. The space combat is wonderfully straightforward and it is fun to inflict status effects which your next ship then exploits, creating massive amounts of damage. This is great! ... and at the same time it bears the question why the ground combat is much more restrictive. It follows the same rules, but your characters have a fixed palette of abilities, which are more varied, granted, but make combos a lot harder to pull off. I found this a lot less rewarding. However, overall Halcyon 6 is great. Although I still feel occasionally overwhelmed by it, even after 20 hours I put into it, that's not the game's fault. Yet, I keep coming back, and that's definitely its fault. :)

A fun game with a great deal of variety and detail. It appears to have been inspired by a number of previous games, but manages to create an atmosphere all it's own. Worth playing.