Halcyon 6: Lightspeed Edition

Lots of details and interesting characters. Sad when I finished.

It got rave reviews at the time it launched, It got even better later - they said! It's buggy. It started to freeze randomly for me. Just ALT-F4 and load the save, play a couple of seconds and encounter a freeze again. Repeat. Oh, now the freeze happened a minute in, but I forgot to save again, so back to square one. It's unplayable in the end and it's a shame.

Way better than expected, really... I played thousands of games, and this is one of handfull that actually managed to surprise me... At first you may think it's rinse repeat kinda deal, but then there's curveball here and there that keeps you awake. Then when the latter parts enter ur on the edge of ur seat again... Usually it's a slow decline to *yawn** in games, but not this one.. Pricing is kinda high for the graphics, but not the gameplay. To make sure you get a better deal, wait for the sales. Personally I never got a better deal for 7 bucks.

I really like the setting of this game, the lone surviving Starbase, struggeling between alien powers. Could have really been a great experience. The execution has its moments. A simple rescoure management, good humor, also it's nice, that gameplay isn't too hard. So one can have some fun. But everything is getting tedious very soon. Ship combat is always the same. Besides a simple logic, which is based on the effects each attack has on the target and the combination of attacks to exploit these effects, there are not much other strategic elements. Ground combat is even worse and it can be quite unbalanced. Also exploits of effects rarely happen in ground combat, because effects aren't mixed as good as in space here. But alright, this isn't where most of the gameplay happens anyway. Nearly every other aspect of the game is underdeveloped or not existing and thus not very interesting: Diplomacy, rescource management, building an empire and power struggle. If this was implemented well, the game would have some spice, alas it isn't. Research is quite alright, though it could be improved. So playing the game is always the same. Send ships to the rescource locations and build them up (until everything is build up), fight against bigger and bigger ships and get bigger and bigger ships. Besides that, one encounters a few bugs (nothing game breaking, except, if you're a linux user like me and don't have LANG=C set per default). And struggles with some Interface issues, which can be nearly as annoying as bugs. (To be fair: In some aspects the interface is done quite well.) For example one oftens wants to find out what and where a specific officer is working at the moment. There is no easy way to do that, one has to go through every possible working place or keep every officers occupation in mind.

When i need instant relief, this is an itch i can scratch ............