Gratuitous Space Battles
If you ever find yourself daydreaming about life as a commander of a space fleet, able to customize your ships and tactics, and watching the ensuing slaughter of your enemies, Gratuitous Space Battles is a game you will ruthlessly enjoy. However, it takes the power of directly controlling your ships right out of your hands. During the actual battle in any scenario, you simply watch, and see if your strategies and tactics were effective.
This brings about very skewed levels of intensity in the game, when compared to a normal space combat game. A lot of your work goes into customizing your ships and tactics, but with the battles themselves all you can do is watch and hope your plans work. So your focus goes into balancing your ships right and counteracting different rules for each scenario.
A lot of thought needs to go into your ships. You'll balance crew and power, among others to be able to support your shields and weapons. There are three classes of ships, fighters, frigates, and cruisers, in order of size. Ships can be outfitted however many times you want and configured to fight in different ways in a battle. You can have as many different kinds of ships, but at the start of a battle you have a specific amount resources available, limiting how many ships you can deploy.
After each battle (assuming you win) you are awarded "Honor", which can be used to purchase new ship hulls, weapons, shields, armor, countermeasures, and the various other items you equip your ships with. Once you own a particular upgrade, it won't cost to move it around as much as you need to, provided your ships can handle it.
Your ships can have a deep level of customization to their tactics. They can be assigned to attack weak targets, retaliate, group up, hold their ground, etc. Along with your tactics there is a light form of multiplayer, in which you can 'upload' fleets in battle scenarios and download others to fight against, but that is as far as it goes.
GSB is not for everyone. Those who want to immediately jump into the heat of a battle and directly control each ship will not find it very enjoyable. If you're on the other end of the spectrum though, the game is perfect for you. You spend much longer putting your ships together than watching them in action, and everything up to that point is quite enjoyable.
Likes:
- Deep level of customization
- Lives up to the gratuitous title
- No resource collecting or empire building
Dislikes:
- Limited multiplayer
- Bit of a tougher learning curve, but not too bad
Review Score
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The review scale at LevelFortyTwo is between 1 and 5. A score of 5 is considered an amazing game, 4 is a well-done game with only minor issues, 3 is in the middle; not great, but not bad, 2 is a very problematic game, and 1 is absolutely terrible.
