Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, Black Lab Games' well-regarded interstellar tactics game, will be delisted from Steam and all other platforms as of November 15.
Publisher Slitherine announced Deadlock's removal from purchase on its website, stating the game and all its expansions are to be "phased out" from sale and "will no longer be available for purchase on any platform" as of Friday next week. "This marks the end of an era for our space fleet, and we want to give everyone a proper heads-up to grab the game while it's still available," Slitherine added.
The publisher didn't provide any reason for Deadlock's delisting. The most plausible explanation is an expired licensing agreement, though it is worth noting that Deadlock partly shares its name with Valve's upcoming multiplayer shooter. Not that I'm suggesting any kind of weird conspiracy on Valve's part to kill off a relatively obscure space strategy game from 2017. But it is an interesting coincidence.
In any case, Slitherine points out that players who already own the game (or purchase it in the next week) "can continue playing it without any restrictions." Deadlock is well worth picking up if you're into either tactical strategy games or big spaceships blowing each other up. Set during the First Cylon War, Deadlock's key hook is that combat encounters are resolved simultaneously, with the player attempting to predict enemy movements by queuing up orders and seeing how they play out.
Although we never reviewed Deadlock, Len Hafer took it for a spin around release, and came away thoroughly impressed by how it captured the feeling of the 2004 show (or at least, its first couple of seasons). "There is no such thing as getting out of a fight clean. Something is constantly on fire, and Saggitaron is perpetually threatening to withdraw their financial support for the colonial military because you can’t be in twelve places at once and someone needed to be sacrificed to keep the war going."
Deadlock isn't the first game Slitherine has pulled from sale this year. In May, it delisted two Warhammer 40,000 games—Armageddon and Sanctus Reach—from Steam. Both of those games are still available on GOG, however, whereas Deadlock is being removed from all storefronts.
While it's a shame Deadlock is being delisted, hope remains for Battlestar Galactica fans. A new tie-in game, Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, is set to release early next year. Unlike Deadlock, Scattered Hopes is a tactical roguelike where you hop between planets and command fleets in real-time battles where your goal isn't to win, but to buy enough time for your fleet to calculate the FTL jump to the next sector. It sounds like a smart riff on Battlestar's acclaimed first episode 33 , though whether a roguelike will serve as a sufficient replacement for Deadlock, only time will tell.
