Gratuitous Space Battles Review

The title is perfectly accurate. In Gratuitous Space Battles, there's no exploration, no expansion, no exploiting, just extermination. There's no diplomacy, no economy, just blowing things up. If you want a 4x title, this is not it. But nor is GSB devoid of the thinkmaking.

When you start GSB, you'll go through the first few battles on normal difficulty using different combinations of the three tutorial ships, and nothing else. What, you will ask yourself, is all the fuss about? This is easy. And then beyond those few battles, you will founder and sink.

Let's 'do the numbers' as they probably say at NASA. Each of the four races has access to three different types of ships. In ascending order of size they are fighter, frigate and cruiser. For each type of ship, there are several hull designs, offering various bonuses and a different number of slots into which you place the ship's modules. Modules are divided up into shooty (missiles, lasers, point defence, tractor beams, etc) and non-shooty (engines, shields, armour, crew compartments and so on) varieties. There are lots of modules. Lots and lots. A shedload, to use a technical term. Now, precious few of these are compulsory, so the amount of different designs possible is even wider than you think. Your ships, for instance, do not need engines. Though discarding engines turns ships into nothing more than stationary gun platforms, stationary gun platforms might very well have a place in your strategy. So any type of ship can fulfill a number of different roles. You are limited only by your imagination. Like most feel-good rubbish, that previous sentence is entirely untrue. There is a numerical limit on the different designs you can construct, but the point is, that number is a big one. You have to balance weight, speed, firepower, defences, crew complement, power consumption, and cost. You can design a ship to be as average an all-rounder or as specialised as you like, without changing ship or hull type. Fancy a fleet of long-range missile launching cruisers, defended by heavily armoured and shielded frigates armed with nothing but point defence weapons, aided and abetted by swarms of unarmoured (read: cheap) torpedo-launching fighters? Probably not, but you can if you want!

The ship design area is simple. You drag and drop modules into and out of slots on the hull. Various values change as you add and remove the different modules. This is straightforward, and good enough for when you're only making a single change at a time, but when you want to compare designs of different hulls (never mind different ship types) it's not so good. Working out the difference between a War Bastard v1.2 and War Bastard v5.3 can involve lots of switching back and forth between the designs. While it's easy enough to give each design a distinctive name, by the time you've unlocked all four races, the list of designs soon blooms to an unwieldy size, easily reaching several dozen per race as the different permutations are constructed. As they're not divided into any categories, this can make navigating the list a minor pain. It is alphabetical, which does help a little.

Once you're done designing ships, you select one of 13 scenarios, a difficulty level, and decide on your deployment, formation, and tactics. Each scenario has a pilot and cost limit. Each ship needs one pilot, so while a pair of cruisers only accounts for two pilots, they're much more expensive than a squadron of 16 fighters. These limits vary, so while you can smash an enemy fleet with a massive swarm of fighters in one battle, you simply can't do it on the next scenario. Just to keep you on your toes, some scenarios have spatial anomalies, little rule variations that decree that shields are useless, or all engine speeds are cut by 25%. Basically, cheeky little pokes that will send you back to the drawing board, swearing.

Now, when it comes to deployment, on the easier two of the three difficulties, the enemy fleet is visible, and you can at least tell ship and hull type. What isn't available is what modules they have. While you're fretting over whether that enemy cruiser is an anti-fighter job or just a massively armoured hulk to distract your fire, you have to decide your starting formation, and what tactics to apply. A basic order system enables you to determine the behaviour of your ships in battle. Orders determine your ships targeting priorities, ranges, and their formation and movement. While not terribly sophisticated, this system works quite well, as long as you remember that an order applies for an entire battle. Once it kicks off, combat is entirely automated. Your ships go to war, and all you can do is watch. No manual control at all. Jut sit back, stroke that chin, and thump your command console when it all goes wrong. Trial and error gaming? GSB is guilty as charged, y'honour, but it's never onerous. I keep wanting to call GSB a puzzle game. I suppose a lot of strategy games are, in some ways. You are presented with a problem, and you have to solve it. Often, there's more than one solution. Occasionally, either the problem is open enough or the tools are versatile enough for there to be lots of solutions. Sometimes, someone looking over your shoulder will tell you the solution, and you will punch them.

You will lose, refine your ship designs, lose, change your orders, win, rush into the next battle and lose, and refine your ship designs... Battles are over in minutes, and can be sped up or slowed down at your discretion. Ship designs can be changed in seconds. Orders and formations are simple and quick to set up, and you can save a favourite deployment to reduce the time you spend setting up.

GSB looks and sounds good. Personally, I think this is a ploy by Positech to extend the life of the game. You start the battle determined to watch the tactical to and fro, but in seconds you're distracted by the glow of lasers and sparkling (definitely-not-photon) torpedoes, flashing shields and glowing engines. You forget all about monitoring how that new armour is holding up, how long your fighters survive, and then the battle's over and you haven't learned a bloody thing. Providing another distraction are your crews, as they observe the battle and manage some surprisingly amusing running commentary. The sound effects and music are so deeply sci-fi it's impossible to pinpoint any single source responsible for their inspiration, although Star Wars is the most obvious for the latter. This is one of the very few titles where my own sound effects aren't better than those in-game.

Although the number of scenarios is very limited, longevity is provided by downloading deployments created by other players, and fighting against them. These challenges can be uploaded for a particular player, or for the whole community, allowing for some interesting contests. When it comes to uber fleet versus uber fleet, there can be only one.

So, it's in 2D, and the combat is automated. Off-putting for certain players I'm sure. But the depth and longevity of the game mainly comes from player creativity, not fancy battlefields or fast clicking. Winning battles earns you honour, with which you obtain access to locked races, ships, hulls and modules, but there's nothing revolutionary to unlock. The meat of the game is beating the scenarios and challenges in as many different ways as possible. Done it on normal? What about hard, where the enemy deployment has changed? What about on expert, where the enemy composition is unknown? If the player is satisfied beating each scenario once, then GSB won't last them very long. But what about using different races, ship designs, fleet compositions, formations and tactics? There's plenty here to work your brain, it just requires a little of that most dreaded, most rare, resource. Effort.

Positech, not one to rest on their or anyone else's laurels, released an expansion, Tribe, soon after the release of GSB. Tribe adds a new race and two new scenarios, creating an even bigger matrix of possibilities to play with.

I can think of many worse Christmas presents for a strategy gamer.