Something I always appreciate about the Giant Bomb guys is their willingness to break out of their bubbles once in a while. Patrick made a point of it back when he was still with the site, occasionally trying genres that he previously had no interest in to see if either they had matured to the point where he found them palatable or he had, switching priorities for what he wanted from a game as he got older and his life got busier. More recently, "New Dan" has been playing more games he wouldn't normally touch (to say nothing of his recent forays into anime), Alex took a chance on Persona 5 despite his dislike of RPGs and found it to his liking, and even Jeff has found room in his heart for some terrible Garfield games, albeit with a certain amount of irony.

Personally, I keep wanting to break into the deeply tactical turn-based strategy empire sim, and I try to do so every couple of years. My favorite PC game of all time is actually one of those: 1994's Master of Magic, a wizard-infused Civilization clone from which I borrowed my avatar. Master of Magic nailed the deliberate global strategizing of the genre as well as featuring suspenseful turn-based battles between large forces of units. Despite being so ambitious that cracks were showing wherever it packed in more ideas and concepts than it could perhaps manage, it had the perfect blend of RPG-style exploration and looting, tactical combat that was more than simply throwing troop stacks against each other like the worst game of Pogs, and long-term planning that required you to consider the necessity of each new structure built and each new unit trained, as well as the added wildcard factor of spells to fling around. When I delve back into this genre, I invariably look towards other fantasy strategy-sims built from the same cloth or those directly purported to be inspired by Master of Magic, such as Warlock: Master of the Arcane, Age of Wonders, or Eador: Masters of the Broken World, but nothing's really stacked up.

So instead, I figured I might want to look to the stars for a Master of Orion clone instead. Halcyon 6: Starbase Commander is functionally that, and I was drawn to its decent pixel art and turn- and ship-based combat. Right out of the gate it's been a little overwhelming with the options it gives you; like many games of this type, it doesn't expect you to win on your first attempt, but learn enough to make the second and third attempts that much more fruitful. I've slowly been building up the titular spacestation (and last bastion of humanity) Halcyon 6, clearing out rooms for new facilities in an XCOM manner while recruiting officers and constructing ships for them to captain, who go out and procure resources from nearby nodes and chase off the occasional pirate or eerie alien fleshship that threatens same. There's a distinct time management aspect too: every action requires an officer's involvement, and every action carries with it a certain timeframe. As you get more officers, you learn to ensure that everyone is always doing something before you let time's march resume, even if it's just flying back and forth to corral resources back to your HQ. I've not yet decided how best to separate my ships: I don't have enough officers for multiple three-ship parties (the maximum number of ships for each fleet), and sticking all my space eggs into one space basket seems unconducive to getting work done, even if it means greater odds of survival against an enemy fleet.

Right now, I'm looking at a long haul of endless resource runs in order to get what I need to recruit new officers and build new ships and/or structures at my base. One possibility is to evacuate some of the nodes so I don't have to protect them or ferry resources back and forth, and instead use that manpower to create manufacturing plants back in the home base as an alternative acquisition method. I'm still wary of sending people off on their own or leaving too few defenders behind in case the pirates or "Collective" (a traditionally human-hating robot faction whose current diplomatic affability I trust about far as I can throw it) come calling again. My ever-present concern is that I'll end up irrevocably locked into a path of death because I didn't work towards some life-saving objective in time, instead wasting it on procuring resources I didn't need or completing missions that don't pay off. Such is often the case with this genre, I suppose.

I don't dislike Halcyon 6, exactly, but it's yet another game of this type that didn't jibe with me the way Master of Magic did. It lacks a strong exploration element - clearing rooms on the Halcyon or investigating new nodes always leads to predictable rewards, and only very rarely do I end up with some valuable and unexpected prize - and the combat just goes from 0-60 immediately with all its status effects and resistances and tactical considerations, not really letting you in on a ground floor variant before ratcheting up all the extra systems and features to observe. That I'm expected to spend a lot of time flying to and from production nodes for the resources I'll need to get anything done makes any future prospects for the game seem undesirably tedious too - I'd much prefer if they just mailed me those resources on a regular basis so I wouldn't have to dedicate one of my guys to it. I'm thinking I'll just chalk this up as another failed attempt to break into this genre and try again with something else in a few more months and/or years. (I have a few similar games in my Steam library awaiting the IGotW treatment, so we may be seeing another one much sooner than that.)

Rating: 3 out of 5. (Customary "add a point if this is completely your bag" disclaimer, since it definitely has a certain pace to it that the traditionally far more patient fans of strategy games would appreciate more than me)