Gratuitous Space Battles plays out like an interstellar fireworks display. You see big space ships duking it out with lasers, missiles and all sorts of sci fi instruments of death. You don’t get to control them however, because Gratuitous Space Battles is a strategy game centered around the planning stage of a space battle.
The planning stage is the entire focus of the game. There are mainly three classes of ships, the cruiser, frigate, and fighter. The cruisers are the big bulky heavy ships. Frigates are the lighter ships and fighters are the tiny ships that buzz around bigger ships like flies. Each different class of ships have different type of hull design that has a host of stats related to them.
Cost, weight, hard and soft points are all important considerations to a budding space ship designer. The hard and soft points are the points on the ship you can attach modules to. You need to balance out the need to attach weapons, defences like armour or shields, power generators, crew living quarters for the battles you will face.
Because the battles you will face will be on the difficult side. To make the most of the situation, you’ll need to read the stats at the end of the battle to discover the weaknesses of your fleet. Do you need more armour? More longer range weapons? Are enemy missiles destroying your fleet?
Of course since these hard and soft points are limited on a hull design, you’ll often have to resort to specialised ships to counter the enemy fleets strength in some cases. Design a missile defence ship designed to deal with incoming missiles, or maybe a frigate with an EMP cannon that disables enemy ships?
Apart from fixing modules, you can also give orders to your ship. These orders range from fly in formation, protect, cautious and many more. These orders allow you to tweak the behaviour of various ships in your fleet. You might find your frigates moving too far forward racing to their oblivion or your cruisers wasting their time trying to swat those pesky fighters. You can use orders and targeting instructions to rectify this.
Once you’ve set up your fleet the way you want it, the battle plays out. This part of Gratuitous Space Battles has been described by other sites and reviews as being frustrating simply for the fact that users that are used to RTS games might not like having no control of your units. I beg to differ since Gratuitous Space Battles isn’t an RTS.
Gratuitous Space Battles gives me that feeling I got when I played the earlier Championship Manager games. The thrill of watching your plan working out well or watch helplessly as your plan crumbles. There is a certain satisfaction to working out a perfect plan that wins you the battle. Or that eureka moment you get when you got the perfect combination.
Multiplayer basically revolves around playing other player made battles called challenges. You could view all challenges in a lobby, play it and rate it like you would on any other media. There isn’t any two player death match. Which isn’t too bad really as Gratuitous Space Battles is a great strategy game that you can pick up to play for a short while.
Gratuitous Space Battles is a fun little game that while being short of missions, makes for a fun diversion. There is a a DLC content called the Tribe DLC pack which adds a new alien race with all new hull design, weapons etc and two new missions which add a little more content when you’re done with the base game. Try out the demo, buy it if you like it.
Pros:
- Pretty graphics and particles effects
- Require plenty rethinking of strategy for each battle
- Easy to pick up and play
Cons:
- Only a few scenarios shipped with the vanilla version
- Certain weapons might be a tad too powerful at the moment
Verdict: Gratuitously Fun
Rating: 8/10
Price USD $19.99
Just out of curiosity, what are the weapons that you think are too powerful?
ReplyDeletePlasma launchers. I've managed to win 3 battles in a row with just using roughly the same load out and cruisers loaded with exclusively plasma launchers.
ReplyDeleteHaha, that's what I thought! I even said this to Cliff Harris who designed the game and he claimed that plasma launchers were balanced because they had lower accuracy. In my experience that's not true however, as their longer range means that they start shooting earlier and so end up being able to make more shots than other weapons, more than making up for the slightly lower accuracy.
ReplyDeleteIn the map with no shields allowed, I tried to use proton beams (lots of armour penetration, low shield penetration) and yet plasma launchers were still better, all other things being equal. It kinda made me lose interest in the game.