Battlestar Galactica Online Review

Controls

Once a player enters the tutorial area of the game, they are walked through the control scheme for controling your ship. These controls that players are learning feel as if they were originaly mapped for a controler, not a mouse and keyboard. This makes the gameplay controls feel extremely taxing to try and keep up with the events going on around you. If, for instance, instead of making the throttle be controlled by the mouse wheel but mapped to the "Q" and "E" keys the player would have a more natural reaction to what he/she is doing as far as movement is concerned. Now when it comes to actualy playing against players and npcs you are forced to find and click your target in order to be able to begin any kind of attacks or manuvering away from your enemy. My suggestion to remedy this is to allow players to use the "TAB" key on their keyboard to cycle through all players and/or npcs around them. Another option to fix this is to either make an item that allows the auto aquisition of hostile targets or to make it a regular feature of the game. The reason I say make it an item is to make it so that if a player wants this ability then they would have to buy the feature with in game currency as to not unbalance the game.

Game Interface

After finishing the tutorial the player is thrust into their chosen race's main facility. Upon entering they are able to aquire their first mission or start their own personal exploration. For those that forgoe their first mission and say choose to go straight to the facility to purchase new ship parts and new ships they are left stranded and forced to find their own way back. Granted the game does warn you that you have to find your own way back before you choose to leave but once you get there you are not given any indication as to what each of the icons on the user interface are for, your map has very little detail and location markers so you have no idea where you need to go, and the game assumes that you know everything about the game mechanics, UI, and gameplay. In order to remedy this you can either redo the tutorial to teach players about the User Interface and/or implement a Tips and Hints feature which would cause random windows with bits of information and help to push the player in the right direction.

Conclusion

Battlestar Galactica is overall a decent game for a browser based game. It does a good job of giving the player the feel of it ACTUALLY being installed on ones computer. Other than the minor issues I mentioned, I would definitely recommend this game to a friend or two.

TALLIED SCORE!!!!!! (drumroll please)............................... 7.25/10!!!!

Thanks for reading guys, If you enjoyed it please let me know, and if you did NOT enjoy it STILL let me know! I wrote this back in November for a job interview, so but the information IS still current, (I checked lol) Peace guys, and I will see you guys next time