But the ships are faithfully recreated, with a few additions. Because the game focuses on fighters they had to add a few more ships beyond the standard Viper (good guys) and Raider (bad guys). So when you advance you get access to new ships with more power, speed, agility, etc. This was done by changing one or two lines on the ship and giving it a new name, sometimes a slightly different color or adding pointy things where there were no pointy things before.

Most missions revolve around dog fighting, though some include bombing runs and installation destruction. It looks good. There's a lot going on during battle, with dozens of ships going at it all around you. There's not much detail to the ships, though, until they're right on top of you, so you'll be using color and hints from the HUD to figure out who's who. The result is an exercise in aiming at icons on the screen instead of discernable targets, which makes the whole experience much less interesting. The ships look good when you finally get a glimpse, but it's always a fleeting glimpse. It's too bad that your best bet at getting a kill is when the target is too far away to make out. It would be a lot more fun to shoot at fighters than to shoot at icons representing fighters.

Ship controls include speeding up, slowing down, performing a barrel roll dodge maneuver and… that's about it. The evasive roll requires one button tap and almost flawlessly breaks an enemy's bead on you, even though you don't move very far from your course. That same button can also be used to match speed with an enemy ship, an invaluable skill in dog fighting. But if the ship is matching speed automatically, you'll never catch up to them. Matching speed means more than that when done manually – you have to get within a comfortable firing range, then match speed, then continue to go faster or slower depending on your opponent if you want to stay with them. The automatic speed matching in Battlestar Galactica only automates the easy part so it's just not very useful.

You can also tweak the characteristics of your missiles by adjusting their speed, power, blast radius or agility. There is only so much to go around, so if you crank up their agility and speed they'll do less damage when they hit. Commands for your wingmen are given through the directional pad and options include the standard Attack, Regroup and Scatter (another way of saying "fire at will"). If you're feeling generous you can let your wingmen suck energy away from your ship so they become more powerful at your expense. In theory, this would make them more helpful during the fight.

And in theory, all of the above options exist to make the dog fighting deep enough to be interesting but it doesn't work out that way. All of the various commands do what you'd expect, but they don't make the fighting much different than if you just fly around and aim carefully. And regardless of what you tell your wingmen to do, the fight doesn't seem to sway based on any of their actions. After replaying missions several times (thanks to the lack of any mid-mission save options) I didn't notice it getting any easier or harder no matter what I had the wingmen doing.

Dragging the whole thing down even more is the sound, or lack thereof. Even with the bass cranked up in 5.1 surround sound, there's almost no sense of impact or importance to even the biggest explosions. They look ok on screen but none of it sounds very rich or satisfying. It's not that the sounds aren't accurate or realistic, they just could have been louder and more distinctive. All of them, except for the voices and music, seem like part of the background when it should be an integral part of the battle.

If you don't know what a Cylon is and don't have any urges to shoot at them, there's not much reason to play Battlestar Galactica. But if you're the type that will get a kick out of watching the fighters launch from the tubes on the titular ship (and those launches look a lot like they did on the TV show), and you long to put those one-eyed robots in their place, this game will entertain you enough to feed your nostalgic cravings even if none of the characters or even the robots look all that familiar. But that can be accomplished in a rental. The gameplay is far, far too monotonous and unoriginal to be interesting for long. There are other space combat flight games that do the job better.