BSG online Review

ChoadSauce

So I haven't seen one review on this game since it came out so I decided to give my educated thoughts on it. First of all I am a big BSG fan (old school and revision) and once I heard about this game I was very skeptical about how good it would be due to it being developed by a small company and it being browser based. I'm too lazy to write this in paragraph form, so I'm going to list my thoughts in a catagorized manner.

First impressions:

-Signing up to the game took less then 5 minutes

-There is technically no "character select screen" you just make a character, choose between 2 ships and off you go. If you decide you want to change your avatars look or your starting ship, I suppose you have to just make a new account. In the beginning I started off as colonial, but I'm thinking of starting a new account to try out the cylons.

-The game requires you to have unity, which is an upcomming game engine originally used for games for the iphone and such. Many props, I think we'll be seeing alot of unity in the future.

-There is no opening cinematic or anything, it just throws you into space and you get com messages from starbuck showing you how to shoot and control your ship etc.

-I had alot of dificulity completing the tutorial missions, It could be because I was a noob at the time but still, they were very hard, and if I died in one of the tutorial missions, It would bug out and not let me respawn, I would have to refresh the page and start it over.

Graphics/animation:

-To my suprise the game looks great for a space shooter. let alone it being a browser based game.

-The ships look accurate and believeble, especialy galactica.

-It doesnt appear that they use normal or specular maps on their models, but they do a good job at faking the lighting of the ships in theyre color maps.

-The character models (while docked) look great, and I believe they do use normal maps on the characters themselves, you can tell by the wrinkle goodness you see on commander adama. The inside of the ships look believeable, although there are no reflections or any sense of light source.

-Speaking of being inside a ship, the animations for the walk/run cycles are horrible, they look like a fridge on wheels.

-Open space looks good. the view distance is rather far, and its moderately populated, with planets, planetoids and asteroids. There really isn't much to say about the space itself, its really just a sphere with a map of stars and nebulas. One complaint I have about it though is that as you fly through space, it shows nebula clouds whisp by you, which can get very annoying if your in a dark room, the whole screen gets dark then bright dark then bright.

-The shooting animations of both the missiles and gatling guns are very believeable, and well done. The look of the combat animations are very true to the BSG revision. its so awesome trying to shake a missile thats locked onto you and seeing it curve left right up down, chasing you. bigpoint did a very good job portreying the "feel" of combat from the show. its quite epic.

-It doesnt look as appealing as EvE, but it looks great for it being browser based.

Gameplay/controls:

-2 words. xbox controller. This game NEEDS 3rd party controller support. using ASDW for moving in XYZ axis's is quite dificult to learn and master. I've kind of gotten the hang of manuvering my viper in intense combat(after a few hours), but then the camera movement is frustrating. There is an auto follow camera option but it is delayed, 

-The UI is self explanitory and explained well in the tutorials.

-Looting is childsplay, kill something and you automatically get a loot popup, loot all.

-Upgrading your characters stats/skills works in a simular was as EvE does. You get experience, and you spend those experience points on a skill, and it takes real time for it to train.

-Upgrading your ship is done very well, its simple yet complex. You can take any module and just throw it on your ship to use. You can then later upgrade those modules for greater effectiveness.

Content:

-Mining asteroids for resources is boring but necessary. You have to scan each individual asteroid just to see if it has anything worthwhile in it. I'm sure it gets easier once you have a better ship with better scanners and such.

-Pretty much all you do in the game is mine, protect a mining ship mining a planetoid, PVP (territory based) or PVE (pretty much wondering around aimlessly waiting for a drone or a cylon to jump into your system. It's limited but still fun because theres an abundance of these things to do.

-I got banned from chat for 2 hours for saying bitch lol.

-PVP is not what I expected, I expected there to just be instance (BG?) types of pvp but no, this works simular to a sandbox. anyone can jump to any system and try to take it over. My 1st day playing this I was in a battle with over 100 ships. This was so epic flying my viper inbetween huge battlecruisers and launching missiles at small boogeys. The best part is that it was almost lagg'less. There is always PVP going on, and even the most inexperienced player can contribute.

-The sound and music in the game is SPOT ON to the BSG revision.

-The grouping aspect of the game is the one BIG problem I have. It is a normal grouping mechanic, you invite and the leader is the only one that CAN invite. This is a problem because when there are so many people in one system and only 1 raid group formed, you have hundreds of people in local chat screaming NEED INVITE! and the problem with this is that you only get experience and loot if someone in your group kills the enemy; meaning if you're not in a group, yet your in a huge battle, you wont see any rewards for it other then a cool light show. there needs to be a big button that says "join group" and it join you in the group thats currently in your system.

-Cubits (money) in the game is really hard to come by, but you do come by it. alot of the games items costs alot of cubits. theres an online store to buy cubits but I'm not a fan of online stores. Ships are very expensive in the game, so be prepared to put in alot of hours if you want the cool ships. I've been playing for about a week and im still strolling around in my viper.

 

In closing I started seeing this game as more of an action game then an mmorpg. I never actually played alot of space shooters, unless you include starfox. This game was alot of fun in small bursts, but if you play it hardcore, you might get bored quickly

Krelian

Nice review, and very informative.

Just to add my two cents;

Plus side;

+Finally another game with NO-FREAKING ELVES and swords,, 

+A sense of progression from the smalles 1 man viper to larger escorts, all the way to the largest lineship to command.

+i am glad that you can take your avatar OUTSIDE OF YOUR OWN SHIP at all! - Even if the animations are not so awesome! I luv it and PERSONALLY makes a difference for me:)

+There is no intro cinematic but you can talk to crew on galactica for some rather detailed heads up.

+As has been mentioned: IMO Graphics would be nothing impressive, IF this was NOT a Browser based game, bur as one; the game looks godly good! Im a graphics whore, i admit, but im totally okay with the games graphical presentation.

+Did i mention no elves?

+Super fast registration is a huge plus,, hehe, any1 ever used playonline for FFXI?:D

+Seems like there are lotsa pieces of equipment and skills to upgrade for starters.

+Controls seemed okay to me, neither impressive nor broken.

The negatory:

-Im just a newb, but if its true that money is that hard to come by, than it kinda sucks, BUT than again, the company has to make money of this software somehow, and the idea (as op pointed out) is that we buy in game cash with real life money....

-I beleive there are a total of 18 different ship classes for BOTH sides of the war (9 each), which does sound a little limited for a game that is all about space combat, but maybe this is because of trademark restrictions etc..

-Oh and i believe that once you create your avatar, you can not customize/change his/her looks anymore. Not a big deal but can be kinda irritating in the future when you finally get tired of your good'ol smelly flight suit.. / Also you can not delete your characters.

Tis was just a review of my INTIAL IMPRESSIONS of the game, and not an actual review like the one posted above by the OP. I just wanted to drop a few more lines for any1 interested in the game.

Cheers.

Copenhagen

Okay I'll add a little on my part:

I thought the whole process of getting going was painless, (I'm taking about the start up, logging on, making account process).   There is no software to download really, because of it being a browser game.   (You do have to install the Unity plugin, if  you don't have it installed already though, takes less than a minute to do that)

As far as the animations go for walking/running while you are docked (out of your ship) I am usually a huge animation whore...I mean I'm really anal about animations.  But, I went into this not really expecting a lot, because of it being a browser game.   So, I can deal with the animations not being "Perfect"...they reall are not all that bad, actually.  They are at least tolable.  Being a F2P game, I'm certainly willing to let it "Slide".   (Rift is a pay to play and I personally thins it's animations are just as bad as this game.)

I am pretty good with the controls, they seems to work fine.  Just a few personal "Pet Peeves" for me.   I would like to be able to walk backwards.  To control your character it's sort of point and clickish.    The ship controls just fine though.   I think the up and down controls might be a little to responsive, but it's managable.

There is suprisingly a low amount of lag, at least for me.

I do have to admit, the game graphics are presented well.

The game plays a lot like Eve Online does.  (Sandbox type skills, and such)  I like this one better because it's free, and when you die in PvP it is not as painful of a penality as in Eve.  Which allows you to "Respawn, and continue enjoying the game".  I like this very much.    Some people want massive death penalties, so theose people will most likely not like this aspect of the game.

There seems to be some bugs, like the "Fullscreen" bug, that crashes the game when you toggle Fullscreen on and off.   A couple chat bugs.  A couple invite bugs, some friends list bugs, etc etc.    If they put effort into fixing the problems, and adding more content, will determine how much money I donate them.

The Mining is, well fun at first, then when you realize that you need to do so much of it, it's boring. 

The missions, are doable, and mainly the same thing each time, with some of the stuff being spawn camped making it next to impossible to complete, I suggest adding more spawns of the stuff that needs to be gotten for the missions.

The missions the old man gives, are by level, so you have to get a few more levels to get more missions from him...I guess.  I'm level 7 now, I have a feeling he may have more missions for me at 10, based on the response he gives.

The ships, are indeed expensive, but anything in a game worth having is usually hard to get.  (The old Time Sink method). Or, you can just buy some money from the cash shop, and keep rocking.   I think F2P models are making a huge rise these days.  There is a lot of Facebook games (that are all crapy in my opinion), that use a model that allows you to pay real money to gain a faster track to what you want.   Same here.  Expected, and I'll probably be spending a little money on it, cause ...well I like it...for now.