Galactic Battles

Galactic Battles is a 2D top-down space shooter where players embark on a long journey through space to fight off alien invaders. Piloting a spaceship, players will encounter a variety of enemies and utilize an arsenal of weapons including regular shots, super missiles, and mega missiles to destroy enemy attacks. Collecting upgrades scattered throughout space allows players to improve their ship’s capabilities, ensuring a challenging and engaging experience throughout the cosmic conflict.

Galactic Battles: A Cautionary Tale of Ambition, Asset Flips, and Fan Film Dreams

In the vast cosmos of video games, every star, no matter how faint, has a story. Some are tales of glorious supernovae that redefine the heavens; others are of celestial bodies that collapse under their own weight, leaving behind a confusing nebula of what might have been. Galactic Battles, a 2018 release by IndieLip and Droid Riot Studio, is unequivocally the latter. It is a game that exists at a bizarre crossroads: a low-effort, commercially released asset on Steam, forever entangled with the ambitious, unpaid passion project of a Vancouver-based fan film of the same name. This review is an archaeological dig into that peculiar intersection, examining the failed game, the impressive film, and the confusing legacy they inexplicably share.

Development History & Context: A Tale of Two Galaxies

The story of Galactic Battles is not a singular narrative but a dualistic one, a case of mistaken identity on a cosmic scale.

The Fan Film (The “Real” Galactic Battles)
Beginning around 2013, director Calvin Romeyn spearheaded an astonishingly ambitious project: a live-action/CGI crossover fan film featuring characters and iconography from Star Trek, Star Wars, Mass Effect, and Halo. This was a grassroots effort, fueled purely by passion. Over years, Romeyn assembled a team of over 20 digital artists, sound designers, and actors—including Mark Meer, the original voice of Commander Shepard from Mass Effect. They secured sponsors for hardware and software, developed an industry-grade production pipeline, and poured their free time into creating what they dubbed “The Ultimate Crossover Fan Film.”

Their journey was marked by financial struggle. Two separate Indiegogo campaigns (2015 and 2016) failed to meet their goals, raising a paltry $3,424 CAD against a combined goal of $17,000. Despite this, through sheer determination, the team completed filming and a staggering 200+ CGI shots. The final 20-minute film, Galactic Battles, debuted on YouTube in December 2018 to a warm reception, garnering over 67,000 views and a highly positive like-to-dislike ratio. It stands as a testament to fan dedication and collaborative spirit.

The Video Game (The “Other” Galactic Battles)
Concurrently, but entirely separately, a developer or group operating under the names “IndieLip” and “Dmitriy Uvarov” was preparing a game for release on Steam. Published by the curiously named “Conglomerate 5” and “Droid Riot Studio,” this Galactic Battles was a 2D top-down space shooter. It was developed on a shoestring budget, with minimal technical requirements (a 1 GHz Dual Core CPU and 1GB of RAM) and a tiny file size of 350MB.

The game’s development is shrouded in obscurity, typical of what the community often labels “asset flips”—games quickly assembled from pre-made assets in stores like the Unity Asset Store with minimal original coding or design. It was released on January 31, 2018, nearly a full year before the fan film premiered, at a price point of $0.99 (often discounted to $0.49). This timing and the blatant use of the identical name create an inescapable conclusion: the game developers appropriated the title of the then-in-production, well-publicized fan film to capitalize on any potential search traffic and interest, a cynical move in the crowded Steam marketplace.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: The Void of Meaning

For the video game Galactic Battles, the term “narrative” is a generous overstatement. The provided Steam description is a masterclass in vague, Engrish marketing copy: “The essence of this game is to go through a very long space journey where you will come across a variety of enemies, with a variety of weapons.”

There is no plot. There are no characters. There is no dialogue. There is only a premise: aliens exist, and you must shoot them. The “very long space journey” is not a narrative arc but a descriptor of its repetitive level design. The game possesses no thematic weight, no commentary on war, humanity, or exploration. It is a hollow shell, a functional program going through the motions of a genre without understanding its soul. The only theme it inadvertently explores is the theme of digital commerce: how a product with the absolute minimum viable content can be packaged and sold.

This stands in stark contrast to the fan film, which, by its nature as a crossover, is bursting with narrative ambition, leveraging the deep lore and beloved characters of its source materials to create a new, celebratory story.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: A Broken Constellation

As a shooter, Galactic Battles fails at the most fundamental level. The gameplay loop is brutally simple and instantly repetitive: move a ship with the keyboard, shoot with the mouse, collect floating upgrades, and destroy identical waves of enemies.

• Core Gameplay: Described as a “complex 2D top-down space shooter,” the game is anything but complex. The controls are often cited in user reviews as clunky and unresponsive. The enemy AI is rudimentary, typically following preset paths or charging directly at the player.
• Arsenal & Progression: The player has access to “regular shots, super missiles, [and] mega missiles,” but in practice, these feel like minor variations of a single attack. The “upgrades” scattered throughout the levels provide stat boosts but offer no meaningful tactical choices or build diversity. The promise of improving your spaceship leads to no visual or visceral change in the player’s avatar.
• UI & Technical Performance: The user interface is barebones and often poorly translated. While the system requirements are low, player reports indicate a experience riddled with technical issues, including bugs, crashes, and a general lack of polish.
• Innovation or Flaws: There is no innovation here. Every mechanic is a diluted version of a concept perfected by games like Galaxian, Geometry Wars, or FTL: Faster Than Light. The flaw is the entire execution; it is a functional program that lacks the design, balance, and feedback loops that make games enjoyable. Its 49 Steam Achievements feel like a checklist of mundane tasks rather than rewarding challenges.

World-Building, Art & Sound: Asset #0427

The artistic direction of the game Galactic Battles can be summarized as “generic sci-fi assets.” The visuals are a pastiche of uninspired 2D sprites—blocky ships, bland asteroids, and explosion effects that were dated a decade before its release. There is no cohesive art style, no atmospheric lighting, and no sense of a lived-in universe. It feels like a tech demo assembled from a free asset pack.

The sound design is equally forgettable. Laser blasts and explosions are stock audio effects with no punch or weight. There is no memorable soundtrack to accompany the “very long space journey,” only likely a short, looping electronic track that fades into auditory oblivion.

This stands as the greatest insult to the fan film, whose team spent thousands of hours crafting original CGI models of iconic starships, designing costumes, and composing an original score by Jose Pavli to build a believable, immersive world that paid homage to its sources.

Reception & Legacy: A History of Negativity

The commercial video game Galactic Battles was stillborn. With no critic reviews on Metacritic and a complete absence of professional coverage, its entire historical record is written by its players on Steam.

Its reception is overwhelmingly and consistently negative. At the time of writing, it holds a “Mostly Negative” rating from over 100 user reviews, with only 33% of them positive. The positive reviews are often sarcastic or joke recommendations, while the negative reviews are brutally honest: “Asset flip,” “Waste of money,” “Boring and repetitive,” “Feels like a mobile game from 2010.” Its player score on Steambase is a dismal 36/100. It has no legacy in the games industry, influencing nothing and serving only as a footnote—a typical example of the low-quality chaff that clutters digital storefronts.

The legacy of the fan film Galactic Battles, however, is one of admiration within the fan film community. It is frequently cited as a must-see example of passion overcoming budgetary limitations. Its legacy is one of inspiration, showing what can be achieved with a dedicated team, even in the face of failed crowdfunding.

Conclusion: A Star That Never Ignited

The video game Galactic Battles is not a misunderstood gem. It is a cynical, poorly constructed product that leverages the name of a more passionate project to mask its own profound inadequacies. It fails as a narrative experience, a mechanical challenge, and an artistic pursuit. It is a black hole of creativity, offering nothing of value to the player beyond a literal forty-nine cent lesson in the perils of impulse buying on Steam.

Yet, its existence is forever tied to a much more interesting story. The true Galactic Battles is the fan film—a project that embodies the very passion and ambition its video game namesake so glaringly lacks. For historians and journalists, this episode serves as a perfect case study in the dual nature of modern digital creation: one path dedicated to art for art’s sake, the other to commerce at its most hollow.

Final Verdict: The game Galactic Battles is an artifact of exploitation, not entertainment. Its place in video game history is secured only as a cautionary tale, while the fan film of the same name deserves recognition as a commendable achievement in fan creativity. Avoid the former; seek out the latter.