One of my favorite moments was a quest reminiscent of Alien in which my crew had to hunt an elusive Xenomorph-like creature hiding in the ducts. Aliens constantly drop by your base to alternately tease and threaten you research is plentiful, and there are some cool choices to be made. There's a ton of work still to be done, with the initial release being only the foundation.īut that's not to say that Halcyon 6 feels empty by any means.
Looking at the current stretch goals, which include deep starship customization, new win conditions, diplomacy, and additional character classes, its apparent that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with this game. It's there that Halcyon 6's difficulty curve starts getting a little steep, the balance of which speaks to its status as a work-in-progress Kickstarter project (Halcyon 6 exited Early Access last week but still needs to hit its various stretch goals). Though relatively plentiful early on, you have to be careful how you spend them because you need every last bit of material in the second act. Resources are incredibly important in Halcyon 6. Later in the game, you will likely have at least one fleet completely dedicated to resource collection while another fleet handles combat, which makes for a lot of clicking. Resources can also be obtained by building up your base, defeating enemies, and completing quests, but at some point you'll need to make the rounds with one of your fleets and pick up your tribute. Heightening the sense that you're on a real grind is the fact that you have to manually collect resources from the various facilities that you find. The net result is that Halcyon 6 offers little in the way of meaningful customization, which in turn makes the combat feel like a bit of grind. Halcyon 6 is sorely missing some kind of loot component and even with additional tiers to unlock, there's really only six ships to choose from. Fleet composition offers some depth, but there really needs to be another layer to the strategy - and more ships, too.
This is where I share my first major caveat about Halcyon 6: The combat gets kind of repetitive after a while. You can also buff or heal your own ships, as well as inflict debuffs on your opponent. The turn-based space combat is reminiscent of an RPG: Each ship in your fleet has a variety of attacks that can inflict different status effects, which can in turn be exploited for extra damage by follow-up strikes from your other ships. Once you get a decent fleet up and running, you spend the bulk of your time going out on sorties and dealing with the Chruul, pirates, and other problems. Most of the time you are inundated with information as your tasks are completed, your officers promoted, and your colonies call out for help. Between the tutorials, targeted quests, and story beats, there's never much question of what you should be doing next, only how you should go about it. There's actually quite a bit to manage from the start, but Halcyon 6 does a good job of taking you through the basics of building a spaceship, excavating new areas of your base, and researching new technology.
Your task is to train up officers and gather resources from friendly colonies, all while building up your base and researching new technology. You wind up taking refuge on an ancient starbase, which becomes your starting point as you try to build up a new fleet and take the fight to the Chruul. In Halcyon 6, you are one of the last remaining Federation commanders following a catastrophic attack by a rather nasty race called the Chruul - spacefaring monsters from beyond our dimension. The reality turned out to be somewhat more complicated. My hope as I played the first few hours was that I had found one of my favorite games of the year. What I found was a game that wove together many of my very favorite game elements: Turn-based combat, RPG elements, base-building, and strategy all with an attractive pixel art look. XVqkQgzHoD- Kat Bailey September 9, 2016 30 minutes into Halycon 6: Starbase Commander, and I LOVE IT.
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