GOL Cast: Destroying Frakloads Of Toasters In Diaspora: Shattered Armistice

Ever wanted to fly a high-speed interceptor in a big dogfight against a superior enemy force like in Battlestar Galactica? Well, it's possible thanks to Diaspora: Shattered Armistice! Let's go kill some toasters!

Diaspora: Shattered Armistice is an open source game that uses the Freespace 2 engine. It's a Battlestar Galactica fan game in which you play as a Viper pilot aboard the Battlestar Theseus in the beginning of the Second Cylon War. You must defend the Theseus and accompanying refugee ships as the massive Cylon offensive wipes out the human colonies one by one.


Some time ago I decided to watch the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series and absolutely fell in love with it and very quickly went through all of the seasons. I didn't feel like I had had enough though and happened to recall there being a BSG game natively on Linux. And thus I downloaded and compiled Diaspora: Shattered Armistice. And I do have to say, Diaspora surprised me quite a bit.

The story of Diaspora: Shattered Armistice is a quite good one and feels authentic. It's also mostly separate from the story in the BSG TV series, so even a person that has never watched BSG can pick the game up and enjoy it without having really missed anything. I imagine there are many here among us that haven't watched the show before and they will most likely be quite pleased about that. Battlestar Theseus and its crew are all original and there is only one reference to the storyline of the Galactica. The game also feels a lot like the TV series in that the developers absolutely nailed the atmosphere of the series. The situation is desperate and you are forced to be on the defensive constantly. When the Cylons show up it's usually just a battle for time until your fleet can jump away to relative safety.

As a Viper pilot your job in the battles is to keep the enemy interceptors (also called Cylon raiders or toasters) away from the bigger civilian or military ships. There's very little you can do about the big Cylon basestars so you can usually ignore them. You probably wouldn't get to worry about them too much even if you could because the toasters will keep you quite busy. The battles are quite chaotic and sometimes it can feel like there's too much confusion and too little time to figure out a way out of a particularly nasty situation.

Partially because the game is based on the Freespace 2 engine, there are a lot of controls. This is something I also mentioned in the recent Freespace 2 article we wrote. At first the amount of controls can be quite daunting and on some keyboard layouts you might want to do a fair bit of adjustments so that you have all the necessary stuff available to you. But, like with Freespace 2, after a while you will learn the controls and there's a tutorial that teaches you all the necessary things pretty clearly. The Viper handles quite well and the developers made one quite neat change to the otherwise quite Freespace 2-ish gameplay and it's the ability to “glide”. This is a maneuver that the Viper pilots used quite a bit in the series. Essentially it means turning off all the engines so that you keep going in the direction where you were last going but at the same time you can turn and face any direction you want. This is quite handy for dealing with pursuing raiders that have managed to get behind you.

Diaspora: Shattered Armistice is probably one of the most professional looking freeware/open source games I've played. There is quite a bit of original content here and it's not just the story and a couple of models. The game features a few cinematics and an original soundtrack created in the style of that in Battlestar Galactica. The game also looks quite pleasing graphically and the models are well designed. Considering this game is made by fans on their free time basically without the help of some wine-drinking businessmen, it's quite a feat.

I have praised the game quite a bit, but there's no reason to get overly excited. The game is very short. You will only get about 90 minutes of gameplay out of a single playthrough. The game is supposed to get released in multiple episodes and the current release is the very first episode and the second one is currently being developed. There were also a couple of crashes but they were very random and also pretty rare so they weren't that frustrating.

The installation process might be a bit complicated for some, since the official instructions involve compiling the FS2 Open engine and associated launcher. You should be fine if you follow the instructions carefully. It's also possible that there some third party packages floating around but there aren't any official packages on the Diaspora website.

Overall Diaspora: Shattered Armistice is a very nice experience and I would recommend you download the game. Even though the game is quite short, it's still 90 minutes of good entertainment and with its price tag of 0€, $0 and £0 I think it's quite reasonable. However, I'm afraid I can't get any relief until the second episode is released. Hopefully the wait won't be too long.

Diaspora: Shattered Armistice website: http://diaspora.hard-light.net/ Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.