Halcyon 6

[unimural]

Halcyon 6 is out. Massive Damage, the devs, say the following:
 

A retro space strategy RPG with base building, deep tactical combat, crew management and emergent storytelling.

 

Which is a passable description. It has

• X-COM antfarm basebuilding
• a simple tech tree
• Final Fantasy VI era JRPGish combat
• a single scenario with lots of scripted events, storybits and conversations
• a bit wonky starmap exploration (very) vaguely reminiscent of Starflight and Star Control II
• pixel graphics

The narrative borrows widely from typical sci-fi tropes, the first two+ hours have been good fun. You play as a starbase commander and you send officers on missions with ships. You talk with alien factions and fight a war. It's very combat heavy, and personally the aesthetics feel a bit dispirited to me.

 

The game does have some procedural and random elements, but the main narrative, I believe, is the same every time. All in all, the game has a fair amount of the game I've been dreaming about ever since Star Control II and Babylon 5. Fortunately it seems to work pretty well.

 

I backed this on Kickstarter. There are still some stretch goals missing from the game and I think I will end up waiting until the game is done for good before actually jumping in. It is not in early access, though. These days I just prefer to wait until games with a storyline are done with adding DLC and whatnots before I play them.

 

Has anyone else been playing/following this?

[Another_Kmurphy]

I saw this at Pax and it looked very interesting. Its definently on my list of games to check out.

[ratzofftoya]

I kinda bounced off of this.  It hard the problem that a few other games sometimes present: a long tutorial introducing a bunch of systems.  I complete it, I quit, then I reload my game the next day only to be confronted with a world map and absolutely no idea what I should be doing.

[Dewar]

Looking forward to seeing the GB video of this. The description had me until 3v3 turn based combat.