Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra

WHQ2 has some competition: Halcyon 6 coming Oct 19

iOS Universal, PC/Mac/Linux •

We’ve cleared the Stately calendar next week so we can focus on the release of Perchang‘s Warhammer Quest 2. It looks like our focus has been a little too focused, however, as WHQ2 isn’t the only interesting release coming next week. Thanks to our friendly neighborhood journalists (not to mention Touch Arcade), we now need to divide our focus between WHQ2 and something from Massive Damage called Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander which is also releasing on October 19. Oh, woe is us.

Get this, the developers have put together the following list of inspirations for Halcyon 6: classic games like Star Control, Master of Orion, X-COM, Civilization and new classics like FTL. Well, damn, if that isn’t a who’s who list quality sci-fi strategy goodness. Can it actually cover all those bases, though? I have to say it looks promising.

The premise revolves around you defending Earth from the Borg. I mean, Terran space from a mysterious alien force. To do so, you have to reclaim Deep Space 9…I mean Halcyon 6, a derelict space station located on the edges of Terran space. You’ll spend your game rebuilding the station, exploring strange new worlds, and seeking out new life and new civilizations. Basically going where no one has gone before.

If you can’t tell, I WANTS ME A STAR TREK GAME, so I might be projecting a little bit. The description, however, sure sounds like it will fit the bill. You’ll have to organize your crew, assign them to ships and away missions, defend your base and away teams from threats, and more. It looks pretty great, actually, even down to the retro, pixelated art that worked so well in FTL.

Features:

  • Base Building: spend resources to build station facilities (rooms) to enhance your production and technological capabilities, or build ships to help you control more territory
  • Exploration: assign your fleets to nearby star clusters, where they can handle emerging enemy threats, do missions for alien factions or secure bonus resources
  • Crew Management: assign crew to station facilities to greatly improve their output efficiency, or to ships where they can contribute in unique ways to combat, missions and events
  • Deep Tactical Combat: fight tactical ship or ground battles to resolve hostile events, create a foothold in the sector and ultimately defeat the enemy mothership!
  • Story Events: based on game criteria like rooms-built, alien diplomacy scores or officer traits/skills, the game will produce story events (often with multiple choice outcomes) that can lead to combat, time-related applied bonuses/negatives, officer attribute changes or any number of crazy in-game stories.

Halcyon 6 is available right now on Steam for PC/Mac/Linux, so you don’t have to wait until next week if you really want to try it out. If you’d rather play it on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll have to wait until the 19th. Give the trailer below a gander. Looks pretty great, don’t it?

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Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for js619 js619 says:

    May as well just forfeit my TtA games now…

  2. Since Smash Up is a hard pass for me now, I’ll be picking up both of these next week (WHQ2 was always in the budget).

  3. Avatar for js619 js619 says:

    What happened with Smash Up? It wasn’t really on my radar at all, but curious what the issue was?

  4. Not an issue necessarily, but it doesn’t look like it has asynch which makes It useless for me.

  5. Avatar for js619 js619 says:

    Didn’t realize that - firmly agree.

  6. in the TA Smash Up forum a user posted:
    “There is no async mode in the multiplayer. Online games take around 20 minutes each I reckon.”

  7. A pixelated Star Trek-esque game with “Star” and “Command” in the title? Uhhhh /fever dream flashback to 2013/ I’m fine, it’s fine, you guys go first.

  8. Oh shit, I had completely blocked that out. Thanks for bringing those memories back.

  9. Avatar for athros athros says:

    Halcyon 6 is so much more fun to me.

  10. Exactly…I liked Hunters, I liked WHQ, I loved DW:TI and maybe I would like WHQ2 (still miffed about DW:TI) but with the release of Halcyon I wont play much other games on my mobile stuff yet again…darn I see my playtroughplans for FF 6 going on the backburner yet again ^^

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