If you approach Battlestar Commander as a real-time strategy game, you're going to be a bit disappointed with the limited breadth of the game. There's just not that much to see. A handful of ship models, gun emplacements, and play areas are available, but not nearly enough. Even though Battlestar Commander bills itself as an "Epic Strategy Game" there's a more favorable comparison with something like an old-school tabletop strategy board game. Looking at Battlestar Commander from this angle makes more sense anyway, since the viewing area in any level is limited to just one screen-full of action. There are some incidental sound effects, but nothing extensive, just sounds your ships make when they move and explosions when your cannon fire successfully reaches its target. You'll be too absorbed in the mechanics of Battlestar Commander to pay much attention to the window dressing, and we don't mean that in a good way, unfortunately.

The bulk of Battlestar Commander is occupied with Campaign Mode, where the story of your adventures through the solar system takes place. At each planet, you'll make a few stops and take out enemy forces that have massed on the surface and in the skies. Progressing through 100 missions, you'll build your armada and equip your mothership, and eventually become the ultimate fighting force. Completing missions earns you points that can be exchanged in the Hangar section of Battlestar Commander. We liked the idea of equipping ships and built-in defenses, but doing this as a one-shot seems to limit the game significantly. Whatever build-out you select early in the game will be what you're stuck with, unless you run out and buy more stuff. Having lots of stuff isn't nearly as important as having the right stuff, a lesson we've learned in many RTS and Tower Defense games. We would have preferred a system that let you unlock bays on your ship that could be customized before each level, giving players the flexibility to try and fail and learn. The trying and failing part works just fine, but you can't transfer the learning into action without doing some remedial missions, purely for points. Replay value has to be earned, not mandated.

Multiplayer is actually a far more enjoyable experience than Campaign, because you get a more realistic A.I. The format is a simple head-to-head, playing on the same screen from opposite sides. Goals and environment are configurable, but we wished for a split setting that would allow better handicapping for an individual player. When you routinely play with your kids, you appreciate the chance to play like you mean it on a higher difficulty setting while they putter along on the easiest level.

There are three difficulty settings in Battlestar Commander, but they aren't very transparent. You really see them first when setting up a Multiplayer session, and it's not entirely clear what they change in the game experience. You can tweak a variety of other settings in Multiplayer that make Battlestar Commander a harder game experience. The duration of your turn is the main trigger, forcing you to act and react quickly. The others include setting up obstacles in the level that force ships to jog sideways rather than go in hot against the enemy forces. These are nice features that mix up Multiplayer sessions, but the Campaign mode remains unnecessarily difficult, out of reach for most novice players. It's more of an execution issue than a design problem. The concept of flicking to move ships and shoot cannons is smart enough, but only if it works easily for players. Instead of being responsive, the movement of your ships feels like a curling match gone bad. If this is what the developers intended, we can only imagine they were targeting players out for action more than strategy. We've played some Action/RPG titles, and nothing we've seen demanded quite this level of physical intervention. We got used to it over time, but the first-blush response we had was that things were broken. At least Battlestar Commander offers some helper features in the early levels to get players up and running, but it's still not enough to make the game accessible enough.

Like everything else we do on iPad, gestures are the name of the game. You can't do much more than tap and flick during a session of Battlestar Commander, but you'll be doing both with fervor. The interface is kept clean by hiding ship selection away until you tap a launching bay. At this point, you're greeted with a list of icons showing the ships you've unlocked up to this point, and you can see a running total of the ships on reserve tucked away in a corner. The so-called mothership is minimally distracting, because you really are only seeing a small slice of it. This is smart, and keeps controls predictable. Guns placed on the deck of the ship can be fired by flicking in the direction of an enemy, sometimes only once per turn. These attacks are made more difficult by the flick mechanic, rather than tracing a line of attack or following some guide on the screen showing trajectory. Flicking ships can also be frustrating, but you win more than you lose by sheer violent repetition. Otherwise, Battlestar Commander sports a very clean interface and simple controls that just don't perform as well as you'd like. The ideas behind the game are pretty solid, but execution brings the game down a few notches. Perhaps future releases will make things a bit more springy, and introduce difficulty levels that can accommodate a wider range of players.