Battlestation: Harbinger Extended Edition marks the the third attempt to launch the Battlestation franchise on Kickstarter by Finnish developer Bugbyte Ltd., although after two failed Kickstarter campaigns for Battlestation: Humanity’s Last Hope they have decided to go in a slightly different direction with their latest attempt.
While Last Hope was essentially a space station simulator with RPG and tower defence trappings, Harbinger instead functions as a roguelike strategy game that sees you attempt to guide a battleship across a sector of space, fighting battles and upgrading your ship as you go. FTL is an obvious inspiration here, although you’re not quite as isolated as you can regroup at friendly battlestations and even recruit additional vessels to accompany you. Like FTL though it promises to provide a stiff challenge.
The first campaign for Battlestation: Humanity’s Last Hope was cancelled in November 2014 after raising only $13,000 of its $40,000 target and the second campaign in September 2015 only managed a slight improvement of $14,400. However its sister title Battlestation: Harbinger was successfully released on mobile devices at the same time and was moderately successful with over 10,000 sales and solid reviews.
As the name suggests, the Kickstarter campaign for Battlestation: Harbinger Extended Edition is an effort to port the recently released mobile game to PC (plus Mac and Linux) and as such seems quite a low-risk project. It has already been Greenlit by the Steam community, has a projected completion date of January 2016 and with plenty of gameplay footage seems very promising (especially if you were fan of FTL). The modest target of $10,000 is already past the 50% mark and with three weeks remaining it looks pretty certain to finally mark a Kickstarter success for Bugbyte.
Track the progress of the Battlestation: Harbinger Extended Edition Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.
