There are many who have compared this game to FTL. As a very passional FTL veteran (well over 1000 hours played), I would agree with this relationship - it's clear that elements of this game are inspired by FTL: the sector-hopping map, asteroid & nebula sectors, friendly & enemy battlestations (at least in the advanced edition of FTL), scrap as a commodity - and most importantly, the overall story arc of attempting to save a galaxy by "making-it" to the end of a series of maps and defeating a final enemy (although here, with less of a predictable cast of characters).

However, the perspective is certainly different. While in FTL, I commanded a single ship through various comical hurdles, becoming quite attached to my mighty mantis raiders and my lone zoltan who never got to leave the engine room. they leveled up, my ship gained dynamically altering augmentations, and I was responsible for everything from the timing of my glaive beam shot to ordering my stoic rockman to get out of a room that had been vented to open space.

Here, I am no longer a captain - I am the admiral of a triumvirate of starfaring vessels, built up painstakingly from skirmishes and pitched battles. I can't control individual crew members, because my responsibility is so much greater - I command squadrons of fighters, damn it, and the lives of tens of thousands of human crew surge forth and fall back on my word. FTL was the voyage of the USS Enterprise across regions of brave unknown; in Battlestation, I am the Grand Admiral Thrawn, falling like the fist of an angry god upon an enemy battlestation who dares to encroach upon the domain of Man. When my Capital Ship Armada fires the first salvo of death rays (yes, a Master of Orion inspired element) , and twin Esquishal-class heavy assault carriers burst through the firery cataclysm that remains of the first enemy vessel to rain waves of elite bombers and laser cannon drones upon the enemy starbase, I contain the awesome power of a fully operational starfleet!

So... in short. I like to think of FTL and BS:H as, in a way, sister games. Each complements the other in ways that they can't fulfill alone. Buy it today!

A game with a great deal of potential that sadly falls short of greatness. It very much shows it's mobile game roots in it's lack of depth, emphasis on grinding and short-form gameplay. While the game seemed to be, on the surface at least, a game with much in common with FTL, they're really not all that alike.

Battlestation Harbinger mainly falls short in it's lack of depth in ship customization and upgrades. Unlike FTL, wherein your ship can start as a poorly armed, fragile transport and then by the end of a run be a battlecruiser that makes even the bravest captain in the best-armed dreadnaught shake in his boots, Harbinger's ships really only upgrade in the firepower department. There is an emphasis on building up your fleet to bigger and tougher ships over time, but high-end ships are vastly expensive and as such upgrades come in single huge leaps, rather than gradually. This leaves you at the mercy of a bad encounter bringing a fleet of middling ships to a swift end, with just a few dozen scrap needed for your next big upgrade.

This would be mitigated if you could start with a single high-end ship, but unfortunately the starting ships are locked behind a grindy and honestly pointless leveling system. There's a series of other small, nagging issues, from being forced to buy ships blind mid-run with no way to preview their equipment node layouts before purchase, to game balance being all over the place, starting off reasonable but very quickly ramping up to insanely difficult craft far faster than your upgrades can keep pace with.

All in all, the game's sole saving grace is it's price point. Good for a few hours of entertainment, but far from the soul-sucking obsession other rogue-lites can be. If you've yet to play FTL, or even it's mods(Captain's Edition mod may as well be official for how good it is), get that instead. If you've played several hundred hours of FTL and want something similar, maybe give this a go, but don't expect the same kind of compelling experience.

This game is best described as a mashup of Gratuitous Space Battles and FTL. The graphics and sounds are not as good as GSB, and the rogue-like, perfectly balanced micromanaging of FTL is not present. However, it has elements of both of those games, combining two enjoyable things into one, though not being as highly proficient at either. This is not a knock on the game, it's just where it lands on the spectrum.

I like how the game handles the tactical combat interface. Your ships act how you want them to act. They go where you tell them and attack in the desired order. The only problem is that there is almost no depth to combat. Yeah, you can change where your ships land in the sector, or position them in a minorly superior way, but it does not make much difference. It operates such that you optimize your ships while traversing a map (FTL), but then order them around precisely in real time battles (like GSB). The game consists of 4 procedurally generated sectors (FTL), though each particular sector is wide open for combat (like GSB).

The game becomes far too grindy at times due to poor pacing. There are major spikes and valleys in the opponents difficulty even in neighboring sectors. One second you are destroying face, and the next you are scurrying back to your battlestation to repair. This would be fine, but it is often expensive to upgrade or purchase additional firepower. This sends you grinding around safe parts of the map when you should be getting rewarded for exploring more. This problem worsens as you go on.

The deeper you get into the game, the more boring it gets. I often have my fleet at maximum capabilities in the first map. What this means is that I have no way of improving my ships, and if the enemies keep getting strong, there is no possibility of victory. The game needs tweaks. It's not horrible as it is, but it could be a lot more. This feels more like an early release, at least from a PC standpoint. It is obvious that the game is a port from a mobile platform, that's its ideal niche.

I just got this on sale for 99 cents. It's pretty good but doesn't have much going in the way of plot. Its mostly just grinding randomly generated maps over and over until you unlock new ships. The differences between ships are the number/position of weapon slots and their base stats. All of the ships move so slowly that the only stats that really matter are shields and hull. The missions are nothing more than "clear this sector of enemies" or "deliver this package". No random events or anything like FTL. The only surprises I've seen is a "Nemesis" that occasionally pops up to hunt you in a ship that "might" be slightly better than the other enemy ships.

I doubt I'll stick with this game long enough to actually unlock every ship since each level takes hours of grinding. But for 99 cents I feel I got much more than what I paid for. I wouldn't recommend buying this unless its on sale though.

Game Type/Genre: roguelike
Casual: Yes
Theme: Space
Controls: Basic
Difficulty: Gets easier over time
AI: Marginal
Achievements: Few and grindy


A simple roguelike that gives you control over up to (unlockable) 3 ships equip-able with a small range of weapons in an attempt to get from start to end on a node map without getting shot up too badly.


It’s a good addition to your game collection if you are a lover of roguelike’s like FTL or holy potatoes we’re in space and the so many others. The startup on this game is somewhat grindy and tedious since it’s not otherwise very engaging beyond its core. Absolutely not for you if you don’t like watching your ship explode a lot.

Value For Money
At a 10 euro price tag this game delivers approximately 25ish hours’ worth of game-time if you enjoy the mechanic, want to unlock all the ships that are available and want to scrape out a decent number of achievements. If the unlocking of ships is not enough of a fix for you to keep playing you’re definitely going to not make it to that mark.


It’s tempting to compare Battlevoid: Harbinger to the hundreds of roguelikes already out there but what the half-way good ones always seem to have in common is a slightly different mechanic that gives it a nice little thing to play with.

Battlevoid: Harbinger gives you a starting ship, an obscure mission that for some reason you are in charge of because reasons and send you on your merry way to save the galaxy or in true roguelike fashion basically steer you into the nearest fatal accident in space.

You jump across nodes in a turn based fashion, do a lot of real-time (pause-able) space combat and once you’re done scraping by for a bit you can hopefully but a nice piece of gear for your ship or a ways past that up to two new friends that you control and otherwise fly in formation.
The addition of the up to two allies flying with you is a nifty addition that allows you to play a little bit with a fleet style according to your needs.

For the most part you will however just get vaporized if you’re not careful and since you need levels to unlock better starting ships and recruit-able fleet ships which comes in very slowly in the beginning. The XP rewards at the end of a run also could’ve used some tweaking as it seems awfully slow levelling up in the beginning and stimulates you just killing yourself over and over for the quick xp.

This wouldn’t be so bad but you’ll run out of equipment to try out on your newly unlocked ships long before you manage to unlock all the ships only to notice that they aren’t all that different from each other either.

The fact that there literally was no story beyond a one page blurb and some off comments after the last mission didn’t bother me so much but it was worth mentioning.

The problem with this game is therefore a modest amount of content and a lot of polish. It’s not so much that I wouldn’t recommend it but I’d recommend a lot of other roguelikes before this one would even pop into my head.

6.5/10 Needed more RNG. Didn’t think I’d ever say that

Battlevoid Harbinger sends you on a journey through space to cleanse star systems from alien ships and free your people. Each new star system comes with a different main mission and different aliens.

The game is simple to learn but hard to master. You start with a single ship, equip it with weapons and upgrades and head out to warfare.

Destroyed ships leave scrap and energy knots. Both can be used to upgrade your equipment or buy new gear.

You can trade with friendly space stations and accept missions. Completing missions earns you more scrap and energy knots.

Once you collected enough scrap you can buy more ships. Your fleet can consist of a maximum of three ships. Depending on the ship type some ships can be equipped with hanger bays, allowing you to build smaller vessels on your carrier or destroyer.

Clever selection of weapon types and equipment, like shield or hull generator, will become more and more important as you adventure through new star systems. Different type of aliens use different technology and different weapons and every time you jump into a new system the enemies become tougher.

The range between the weakest weapons and the strongest weapons is tremendous. Ships equipped with strong weapons can kill you in seconds. Regrettably, there's no comparable defence system to these kind of weapons which will ultimately always lead to a very fast and unexpected death.

Dying means permadeath. You only have one life. Death comes fast and is often very frustrating and seems unfair. Out of nowhere a group of heavy ships arrives in your sector and blows your fleet into space in a matter of seconds. You have to replay the game many times in order to learn which weapon and ship setup works best. The game can be very difficult and frustrating at times. Nevertheless I always found myself coming back to retry.

Battlevoid Harbinger is the very enjoyable and highly addictive game that comes with the well known 'only one more round' effect. Nevertheless my recommendation of this game is restricted. It took me 25 hours to beat the game on easy difficulty for the very first time and IMO it seems almost impossible to beat the game on normal difficulty, leave away hard difficulty. It seems like a basic concept of the game to not let you win. This strongly effects the otherwise clearly positive experience with this game in a negative way.

Pros:
- highly addictive
- simple but nice graphics
- simple to learn
- 2 x speed

Cons:
- hard to master
- you are unlikely to win
- quite frustrating every time you lose
- no save files
- permadeath
- limited types of missions
- unspectacular end of game (if you manage)
- scripted events move the camera out of focus during battles (very annoying)
- ship escort achievements are all broken

I am a big fan of FTL and the comparisons to that game are defintiely what brought me here. Having put a few hours into the game I do not think those comparisons are warranted. Unless I am missing something there is nothing that keeps you from simply retreating and returning to any conflict as many times as you like so it is not really all that rougelike and the most strategic decision I make in most battles is how to maximize my starting distance from the enemies. It is not a braindrain and the need to precisely target enemies is just not there, So not like FTL, but I still really like it.

Most games I feel like I can get into the developer's heads and figure out what I am supposed to do, but this game is not one of them. I do not understand the ship progression at all. I feel like the number 11-13 ships are way better than the number 21 ship for example. When you jump to a new sector you cannot neccessarily see if anyone else is jumping into it and this can result in massive ambushes that you have to run away from, so there are plenty of situations that I assume are just unwinnable. Also the experience system is not balanced in terms of time invested and the whole thing is very grindy and slow to start. These are minor complaints though because I really love the core of the game.

I particularly like the end-game. Once you get your three ships and you have filled all the slots you can upgrade some guns, but if you lose the ship you lose those upgrade points which are much scarcer than the regular currency. Instead I have been buying the super advanced weapons at the top of the purchable weapon list that are just brutal. I expect there could be some expansions in the future that would allow some custumization as well. I would recommend this game, but understand that its nowhere near as full and intricate as FTL. It is a 3 ship fleet simulator with some RNG elements and very little customization or variation between the ships.

Battlestation: Harbinger is a space strategy game set in a distant future. In B: H you play as a new Human commander and you’ll be given missions which will see you venture deep into enemy space to destroy enemy installations, explore undocumented regions of Space, escort allied ships and more. While on your mission you’ll be faced with several different factions/races, each with their own ships and weapons. You’re not alone though, once you have enough scrap you’ll be able to hire mercenaries and even build your own fleet.

Full Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the developer.

The first thing to mention is the fact that B: H started its life as a mobile game, a very successful one at that. B: H does differ on the PC and it has benefitted from a few improvements, which can be found listed on the store page. I haven’t played the mobile version, so I can’t compare the two, but what I can say is that B: H doesn’t feel like the kind of game which has been ported just to port it, it feels like it fits in on the PC market. The UI does look like the kind of thing you’d see on a mobile game but it works well with the M&KB and the actual visuals of the game are good.

On to gameplay, each run of the game consists of four procedurally generated levels made up of around twenty to thirty sectors. The first three levels have a different enemy for you to face and you’ll never see two factions in the same level. The fourth level always has the same faction and you’ll never see this faction (or its weapons) in the other levels, I won’t say any more than that so I don’t spoil it. What you actually find in the sectors varies, it may be one small ship, it could be an asteroid field or even an enemy fleet factory. There are other things to find in the different sectors and usually most of them will appear in any given level though, being procedurally generated, it is possible to go through a level without seeing some of the rarer sectors, such as the fleet factory sector.

Speaking of fleet factories, they’re the only kind of spacecraft/installation which is only ever used by enemies. While the different factions, including the humans, all have different ship and weapon designs to each other they are for the most part just variations rather than completely different. The different weapons of course vary in stats and while human weapons are generally well-rounded there are usually benefits to choosing an alien weapon instead. Enemy weapons are sometimes dropped when you take out a larger enemy ship.

Although there are twenty-six human ships, you only start with one unlocked. The rest of the ships are unlocked by earning experience points in runs which will then level you up, one ship for each time you level up. Here lies my main issue with the game, the default ship and the first unlocked ship are so weak that the first hour or so of gameplay isn’t very enjoyable. Learning to play B: H simply isn’t enjoyable. Once I unlocked more powerful ships and I understood what I was doing a bit better I began to really enjoy the game but it’s just worth keeping in mind that you may not enjoy the first forty-five minutes to an hour. Anyway, back to the ships themselves, as well as differing in appearance they all have different stats (Hull points, Shield Capacity etc.) and different facility slot placements.

There are three kinds of facilities in the game, colour coded to make things easy. Red facility slots are for your main weapons or the really beefy support facilities, these are what you’re going to rely on in combat for taking down the big ships and battlestations. Blue slots are for support facilities, these are less powerful weapons or a shield booster which are going to defend against smaller enemies and in the case of the weapons, missiles. Lastly we have green slots, ship hangars. While not all ships have them, these hangars will house small squadrons of smaller ships or drones which can either fill a combat or support role. They may seem negligible but actually having a lot of these smaller ships can sometimes be better than having a bigger, more cumbersome ship (ships with hangars are generally smaller and more nimble).

So what are these battlestations I keep mentioning? Battlestations are effectively huge outpost/city type things which serve as way stations on your journey, or a serious challenge in the case of enemy battlestations. Human battlestations will provide free repair services as well as offering you a mission (with scrap and upgrade point rewards) as well a shop where you can buy or sell any equipment you don’t want or need. These missions are usually easier objectives such as go to X location, collect object Y and then return here but they are the best way to earn more scrap and upgrade points in the game and you’ll be needing a lot of those. Enemy battlestations themselves aren’t much of a risk, they usually only have blue slots and one or two hangars, but they’re always found in sectors filled with small and large enemy ships and so they’re tough to beat. It’s in situations like these where having your own fleet can come in really handy.

Accessed via the formation tab at the top of the screen, the formation menu allows you to purchase up to two ships to accompany you and aid you in your mission. Not all of the ships you can use can be purchased here and they do need to be unlocked by you first but there are a couple of extra ships here which are helpful early on. Purchasing other ships isn’t exactly cheap and once you’ve bought them you’ll need to equip them too with weapons bought using the main currency of scrap and upgraded using upgrade points (unless you picked up some weapons from enemies). The upgrade system in the game is pretty straightforward but instead of simply improving the weapons or support facilities, depending on what you’re upgrading, you may actually worsen one of the other stats for example increasing damage may increase cooldown time. The upgrades all become more expensive as you put more points into that weapon.

Last of all, but by no means least, I’ll talk about how combat and moving through the levels actually works. Combat itself is real-time, though you can decide what to do when the game is paused (there is also a 2x speed option). Your ships will automatically target enemies close to them but you can also manually target enemy ships too, you can even choose what weapons you want to fire at what enemy or what enemy you want your drones to target. Most of the strategy in combat comes from deciding if you need to jump away or what enemy to target but you’ll also need to think carefully about how your ship is positioned as blue slot facilities have short ranges and narrow cones of vision. The level map is turn-based. When you make a move your enemies will also make a move and while enemies stay put a lot of the time, they can jump to different sectors (apart from battlestations and factories) and this can be problematic if you’ve been stuck due to an EMP and a bunch of enemies jump into your sector.

I also recorded an informal review video, if you’d like to check that out you can find it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJpXesvgkJM


An incredibly enjoyable space strategy game, Battlestation: Harbinger offers players great gameplay combined with plenty of unlocks to keep things interesting for a long while. If you’re a fan of strategy games and/or you’re a big fan of all things space, like myself, then you’re definitely going to have fun with this game.

Lone Ranger Reviews.

El K.

So... first off, this game has a lot of fun in it. The basic mechanics are really lovely and there's a lot of really good things going on in it.

However...

The basic balance of the game is really really off. I really enjoyed the basic mechanics of the game enough that I wanted to write a positive review, but after playing through many times, beating it on easy and normal, and getting to about level 16 I just can't endorse this game as it stands. There's just too much wrong in the basic math of the game.

Most of the tech simply doesn't work the way it seems like it should. About half the guns in the game are either worthless or unplayable. The don't create any significantly different tactical situations when used by the opponent or give the player new choices in how to play the game, they just have slightly different animation and math, but essentially are the same. For instance, the Ion cannon disables enemy engines. In theory, this should... do something. But it doesn't. Sure, the enemy stops moving but... who cares? If they were gonna run they still can, and you don't do significantly more damage than they do unless you were already way more powerful than them anyways. Another example: Shields are as far as I can tell close to useless. Most of the dangerous enemies in the game simply ignore shields or blow through them so fast that you can't tell you had them in the first place. Unfortunately the only way to actually improve your defense is to buy... shields... So what ends up actually being true is that the only way to protect yourself is to spam the board with projectiles and fighter squads to block incoming fire. This leads to a remarkably similar run through every time I played.

Perhaps I missed something, but as far as I could tell there was no significant strategic reason to ever choose short range weapons. Sure, some of them are very strong... but you are *always* in danger at short range because all the long range weapons don't lose any effectiveness at short range and point defense weapons stack up when facing six enemy ships.

Last but not least, the... plot... is extremely shoddy. You get a snippet at the beginning about the race and situation your in... and that's it. From there on out the game ceases to resemble a storied universe and becomes a pure game that doesn't feel like a universe at all. Also, the Schillae race is a absurdly sexist concept.

All in all, I feel like this game is a blueprint for a *really* good game... but ulitmately it just seems very much like it's one guy in a basement or an amatuer group who made a passable game and didn't put in the effort to actually flesh it out and make it truly good.

The game is simple, and quite obviously a port from a mobile game, but does scratch the itch for a simple space game.

The Good:
Simple to pick up
UI is funcional
Runs on Linux
Runs on a C2D

The Bad:
Bad Progression (it takes AGES to unlock the first few ships)
Poor communication (There is very limited information, and it's communicated incredibly poorly)
Far too random (The starting resources are 100% random per game, meaning you can end up with impossible to win scenarios from sector one)
The Fleet UI is Garbage (Want to buy a new ship, but also want to know what hardpoints it has? Nope!)

Verdict:
Did you get this for less than a dollar on the humble store like me? Congrats, you now have a great "I'm not really paying attention" game!

Did you pay full price? Congrats, you got a fairly meh port of a Java game.

I *do* like this game, but it's pricing is insane. It's a great $1 game. Anything higher and you're wasting money that could be better spent on virtually anything else.