Galcon Legends Review

The latest addition to the Galcon family, named Galcon Legends has arrived, and a game which springs to mind rather rapidly is Planets Under Attack, another game in which you must conquer planets and its origins start with the Galcon series. But will Galcon Legends compete with the other games of the genre?

You play as Buck, a space-bill collector who needs to get several unruly people to pay their bills. However, as the game progresses, the story unfolds as a much bigger threat than people not paying their bills on time, emerges into the galaxy.

For those who don’t know, the Galcon series is a bunch of strategy games in which you start with an assorted number of home planets. From here you (in most cases) have to conquer all enemy planets in that sector. You take over other worlds by sending ships from your planets to attack them. You control how many ships you use by adjusting a bar on the right side of the screen; the higher it is, the more ships will leave to attack the selected planet. This however, lowers that planet’s ship count. This requires you to choose the right planet to strike with the right planet at the right time. However, this means a lot of concentration and quick-thinking, and you can be defeated rather quickly if you lose it, which will be common, especially if someone else is in the room with you.

However, there is the occasional change of scenario, such as one mission in which you have to survive attacking enemy waves arriving through a portal, another where you have to conquer all neutral planets in a sector before time runs out, and even a level where you're the one who is going through a portal and have to act fast once your ships arrive in the sector. These allow for a nice change of pace and so you're not doing the same thing over again.

Whilst you will find yourself battling the same person multiple times during the campaign, each person will have different approaches, methods and ways of attacking you. One opponent, Zanthor, attacks by sending ships from all  of his planets onto one. This means he ends up with an extremely high amount of ships, forcing you to maneuver around, taking his planets which he has left defenceless. Another opponent’s (The Banjo King) ships move at three times the normal speed, meaning he can attack you and leave little time for you to send ships to defend that planet, and even one (The Phantom) who is invisible and you have to watch for little signs of when he is attacking in order to defend or counter-attack. This adds some difference to the game rather than ‘The further in the game you get, these guys magically get smarter’.

The music deserves applause as well. Each theme is very well picked, with the more fast-paced, upbeat theme for the Banjo King, and the more mysterious theme for The Phantom; each theme always feels right when playing the level.

There are ten difficulty modes, and each is unlocked by beating any level on the previous difficulty (you start with Cabin Boy, then unlock Ensign, beat a level with Ensign, you unlock Lieutenant, etc.) This allows nice replayability, but makes it very hard to choose a difficulty. I found everything past Lieutenant too difficult because after that they remove the ship counter from enemy planets, so you don’t know which planet is weakest, which (personally) I found annoying. Because of this, I ended up finishing the campaign in two hours.

Overall, Galcon Legends is a good game, and still remained enjoyable to me despite the short time it takes to complete and the fact I have already played games of this genre. The occasional humour does get a good chuckle out of you as well, so it’s worth picking up. However, if you’re looking for longer gameplay, you're better off getting Planets Under Attack.