In this day and age, it's vitally important to specialize. I myself have cornered the market on reviewing oddball Japanese imports that scare and disorient other GameSpy writers, while the British development studio Warthog has seized upon the niche of outer-space shooters. Among the games on Warthog's resume are Starlancer for the Dreamcast, Star Trek: Invasion for the PC, and Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter for the current Holy Trinity of consoles (which tanked at retail despite a wave of positive reviews, including my own; you people hurt me sometimes).

Warthog's latest jaunt into the void is Battlestar Galactica, a tie-in based on a television series from an epoch known as "the Seventies," but also kind of based on a brand-new series on the Sci-Fi Channel. What follows is a brief history of Galactica for the young'uns amongst you.

After Star Wars destroyed every box-office record in 1977, Producer Glen A. Larson pitched ABC on the not-so-ingenious idea of an equally space-operatic TV series. Given the greenlight by execs, Larson hired FX wizard John Dykstra (a primary contributor to Star Wars) and an appealing cast headed by Lorne "Bonanza" Greene as Commander Adama.

Battlestar Galactica debuted on September 17, 1978 to 65 million viewers, but ratings steadily declined thereafter; Galactica was officially canned after just 17 episodes because the ratings weren't high enough to justify the mammoth production costs. Thanks to its appealing cast and the unstoppable power of cheesy '70 nostalgia, though, the series has retained a loyal fanbase over the years.

After a couple of aborted attempts at reviving the franchise, the most notable by original-series actor Richard "Apollo" Hatch, Galactica is receiving a glorious 25th-anniversary exploitation; the aforementioned Sci-Fi Channel series, a six-disc DVD collection of every '78/'79 episode, and most importantly for GameSpy readers, a VU Games tie-in.

Galactica is teeming with sumptuous backdrops.
As did the series, the game revolves around a war between the Colonials, the lost brothers of humanity to whom Earth is a legend, and the Cylons, a robot species that has risen up against its creators to fight for its right to party. While the Cylons in the Sci-Fi series look just like humans, the ones in the game are closer in appearance to the robots of the original series, albeit redesigned to look more like futuristic soldiers and less like walking toasters.

The game takes place much earlier in the Galactica timeline than the series; the player controls William Adama as a 21-year-old rookie pilot, as opposed to the badass leader of both series. The storyline unfolds via between-mission CG cutscenes and in-game banter between the Galactica and the pilots, and while there are brief hints of original series cheesiness, the dialogue mostly plays it straight.

Galactica differs from Warthog's previous efforts, and from other space-combat titles, in several significant ways. The first and most immediately obvious design choice is that the Cylons almost always have you vastly outnumbered -- but usually in tin-can ships that can be destroyed with a couple of shots, resulting in a constant stream of targets. There's always something to shoot at.