You can invade people’s games in the Souls games, Dying Light, and Watch Dogs, but, until last week, Mike Fahey and I had never done an invasion quite like the Battlestar Galactica-inspired one we did in Dead Star.
With the help of the game’s developers at Armature, we dove into the Escape Run mode in the newly-released PS4 and PC space shooter. In that mode, a team of up to five players escorts a huge capital through a series of five-minute jumps into ongoing, more conventional 10v10 (or 5v5) multiplayer matches.
When we warp in, the red and blue players who were just battling it out can ignore us and keep fighting, but they’re incentivized to attack us to earn a shot of going on an Escape Run themselves. If they can destroy our four main batteries and our ship core, we lose. We can repair some damage each round, but getting damaged certainly makes it tougher.
The mode was inspired by the Battlestar Galactica episode 33, in which the fleet containing the ship of the same name have to make a warp jump every 33 minutes, only to have the Cylons catch them again and again. The folks at Armature realized they could recreate that experience in their game, with five players hoping to survive six rounds.
The video up top shows how it works and shows how close we got to blowing up.
Dead Star is one of April’s PlayStation Plus’ free games, so if you play online on PS4, I recommend grabbing it and playing enough to earn a contract to go on a run. It was a lot of fun.