Imagine if chess were played where each side got to choose their best and favorite pieces (to a limit, based on power), then attach weapons to their pieces, and then both sides were let loose to have nature take its course for an explosive race to checkmate. That’s a loose comparison to Gratuitous Space Battles (we’ll refer to it as GSB from here on out), November’s release from Positech Games in the UK. Only instead of machine gun equipped rooks, GSB deals in spaceships.

The game takes place in several stages, first building your ships, second designing your fleet layout, and third, sending them into battle. The game has a lot to offer and resource management junkies can truly have a field day micromanaging their fleets and studying the stats after a battle takes place.

Gameplay

The first thing you need to know about Gratuitous Space Battles is that you do not fight the fights. You oversee the warfare, like a general who cut his teeth in an earlier conflict and now gets to plan out attacks for younger soldiers to undertake. This isn’t a negative point, it’s just a key issue in understanding what GSB is all about.

The game leads you into a tutorial which gives you some basic ships to toy with and explains how to lay them out. You have a grid of available space on one side of the playing field, and you can see the enemies’ fleet laid out on the opposite side. The layout of the pre-battle screen is easy to use, and it’s enjoyable to figure out where on the grid to place your units, and which ones seem like they’ll do the best job for any given task. Once you’ve expended your total available pilots or cash, you can let the battle run rampant. You then sit back and watch from your overseers chair to see if you made the right decisions in regards to ship choices and fleet numbers. With the battle underway, you have the option to track individual units, and speed up or slow down the warfare. The standard speed setting was aggravatingly slow, so each battle I cranked the speed up to four times the normal speed. This way, I’d get to the end result faster while still getting a view of which ships were working and which ones failed miserably.

You are given a certain amount of honor based on how you won each battle. If you minimized pilots and cashflow, then you earned more honor for that specific conflict. Honor works like cash in between fights, where you can purchase upgrades for weapons, engines, shields and other components, as well as opening up the other playable races (each with their own types of ships). Each race plays out in a similar fashion, which is disappointing,because the single player missions remain the same no matter which race you are playing.

I plowed through my first playthrough quite easily and without designing any custom ships. Of course you can adjust the difficulty as you go, but my original strategy was load up as many powerful ships into a group as were allowed by the limits, and set them loose. It worked on almost every mission. But much to my surprise, the game offers “infinite” challenges, where wave after wave of enemy are sent to chase you down. My “give ‘em all you got” strategy failed in the first round of attacks. After effectively winning each fight, I hadn’t yet been encouraged to try new things. Each fight in the single player campaign is very similar.

The game could use a better tutorial on how to create ships. The information is there in the manual, and a lot of it is trial and error, but it took me a while to figure out how to create an effective ship. My first outing looked like it’d be great, only I soon discovered that my ships didn’t have any engines, so they were sitting ducks against an impressive enemy fleet. On one hand, it’s nice that the game doesn’t coddle you into creating the same uniform ships that everyone else does, but on the other hand, it can be quite daunting.

Style

There seems to be a rift in between the game’s menu and design graphics and the actual battle graphics. The graphics during battle I found to be top notch for a space simulator, but in the menus, although each ship component was detailed, the layouts seem lackluster and as though they could have been from a different game.

In battle, ships fly smoothly, swarms of fighters surround bigger frigates, ships explode into fragments, and everything looks beautiful.

Story

There is no real story to the game. There are three races and obviously they don’t get along. But as far as personality, the game’s got it in spades. You can name each individual ship, or enjoy the variety of ship names that were already programmed into the game. You can also read a slew of pilot chatter, with screams of death, jokes, or simple gossip.

Everything Else

One aspect I found lacking were the sound effects. While the music provided a good background for the game, the sound effects stack on top of each other until it reaches an annoying cacophony of repetitive blasts. I often found myself turning down my speakers just to cut down on the loops of “pew pew” noises.

Maneuvering through the menus is also a tedious experience. You’re quite often sent back to the main menu, just between creating a ship, choosing a mission, or checking out other options. It felt like there was a disconnect to the different elements in this way.

The multiplayer aspect of the game is something that will give it longevity. Players can create a fleet and upload it for other players to challenge. Like an old fashioned game played via snail mail (only much, much faster). This means that players are directly interacting, just putting up their best armies and awaiting the results. Personally, I got spanked from a slew of online personalities. But the heavy hitters in the online competition really know what they’re doing.

GSB is a title with depth and detail which is sure to attract a dedicated crowd of gamers who love the little things and being in control. But this same complexity can scare other gamers off.

The game is available through Steam or Positech’s website, with an additional expansion pack called The Tribe now available (not included in this review).

[Positech Games provided DIYgamer with a copy of the game for review purposes, this in no way affected the outcome of the review]