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I must admit to being a huge Battlestar Galactica fan, so imagine my delight when I discovered a community project to make a space combat game from the same universe! It combines some of my favourite words - community and game but the best thing is that it's actually a hell of a lot of fun. The controls are complicated, as not only do you have traditional control over propulsion (e.g. thrust and 'flaps') but also manoeuvring thrusters as well. This means it takes quite a while to get adjusted and I can hear Starbuck berating me in the back of my head every time I muck up a turn. I am such a frakking nugget at the moment in this game at the moment. The Cylon raiders are every bit as dangerous as they are portrayed on TV, twisting, ducking diving making it very difficult to destroy, even in a one on one battle. There have been times when I have had an AI Cylon raider in my sights but the damn thing kept twisting and turning around asteroids making it extremely difficult to kill. There are a few issues with the game which are caused by the engine on which the game is based. Occationally there are graphical clipping errors on the asteroids but on the whole these are pretty small issues.

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The only draw back is that you really need to use a game pad to play this game properly, preferably one with a lot of buttons although there is a lot of talk on the forums of people quite happily using a keyboard and mouse. The number of single player missions is currently a bit limited but that is mostly because only a short demo has been released. Multiplayer on the other hand is fully implemented thanks to it being based on an open source port of Freespace2 and is a lot of fun with several teams having cropped up.

This is definitely one to check out and bookmark, if their future release builds on the demo, it will rival several recent commercial games.

BtRL Videos:

Thanks to Simon for help proofing.