Gratuitious Space Battles Review

Gratuitious Space Battles is - wait for it - about gratuitious battles, in space. Dreampt up and coded by Cliff Harris of one-man games-outfit Positech Games, GSB is a neat product with an amusing, irreverant tone and a surprising amount of depth.

The showpiece feature of the game is, of course, the gratuitous space battles. In the finest tradition of the all best space operas, everything plays out like a second world war naval engagement in the stars. Great hulking cruisers lumber around the battle-space blasting chunks out of each other with brightly coloured beams and space-torpedoes, while one-man (or alien) fighters zip past missiles and peck away at larger craft, or engage in twisting dogfights.

The first thing to say regarding these battles, which are drawn in two-dimensions, is that they are positively gorgeous to look at: set against backdrops of planets or nebulae, they are full of bright colours, unique ship designs and lots of neat details. Small drones will launch from the innards of damaged cruisers and begin to repair damage to the hull, for instance. Stricken craft on the edge of 'complete structural failure' will spit out escape pods just before the fireworks go off, and the remains of exploded ships will sink slowly away into the depths of space as the battle rages on without them. A lot of space battlin' can fit on the screen at any one time, and it can be genuinely interesting to just sit and watch the action unfold, even with a fast forward tool sitting in the bottom left of the screen waiting to be clicked.

But, I'm getting ahead of myself. The meat of the gameplay is to be found not in the battles themselves, over which the player has no direct control, but rather in the game's ship design and battle planning segments. The first task for the budding space admiral is to design the ships that he/she/it will order into battle. There are three classes of ship to play with: massive cruisers, medium-sized frigates, and tiny fighters. Each has its own role in the space-armada, though frigates do sometimes feel a little too vulnerable.

Ships are designed by first selecting a hull, each of which has different properties, and then appending to it an array of modules: weaponry, engines, shields, crew quarters and a variety of other components. There is a huge list of modules to choose from for each class of ship, and the total possible combinations must be a very big number indeed. The process of designing ships can be surprisingly involving: skimp on the engines to save power? Stack up the shield units, or stick on two more massive death lasers? Do those fighters *really* need shields, especially when they go quicker without them? These are the sorts of questions you'll ask yourself when putting together your space fleet. Although the sheer number of different modules may make ship design something of a grope in the dark to start with, it didn't take me long before I was piecing together purpose-specific ships - anti-fighter frigates, torpedo-fighters, ultro-cheap cruisers and so on. If you've ever enjoyed messing around with a big box of lego blocks, the appeal of the ship design in GSB ought to be quickly apparent.

After the ship design comes the set-up for the gratuitous battle itself - prior to each engagement the player must position their space fleet and issue orders to each of the craft at their disposal. There is no shortage of different orders to give, ranging from commands to keep moving, to co-operate with other vessels, to orders to mantain a certain distance from opposing vessels - useful for making sure that all of a ships weapons are in range. Positioning is also very important - concentrate your forces, or spread them out? Keep the fighters with the big ships, or order them off to make a nuisance of themselves amongst the alien fleet? There are plenty such things to consider here for the aspiring space-fleet commander.

Post-battle there is a useful stats screen, offering information about the battle and the glorious victory or 'strategic sacrifice' of your death-fleet. It provides detailed information about which weapons and ships caused the most damage, what percentage of shots fired by each weapon hit their target, which were nullified by shields; casting light on the question of which craft contributed to the cause and which were merely there to enjoy the bright lights. Depending on your performance in the battle, and which difficulty level you played on, you will also be awarded points which can be spent to unlock new ship modules and hulls.

There are only about twenty official battle scenarios that come packed with the game - including all the scenarios that come with the race-DLC expansions. This is not a major problem however, as GSB includes an in-game browser for downloading and playing challenges put together by other players. These vary in difficulty, and there are all kinds of different fleets out there waiting to be annihilated, though the process of figuring out how to defeat each one becomes a little too formulaic after a time. The base game comes with four different races, with differently styled ships, and there are three more available via DLC - and for those who feel that Gratuitious Space Battles is just *too* gratuitious, there is a simple campaign expansion on the cards as well.

Gratuitious Space Battles is a very creative product, full of charming little touches that come from a willingness by the developer to keep improving the game with periodic patches. It also has a depth that springs naturally from a very simple core concept: that it's fun to watch flying platforms of giga-death blast laser beams at each other in space. Everything in the game operates in support of this idea, and it works tremendously well.

4/5

PLUS
-Gorgeous 2D graphics
-Sense of humour
-Interesting gameplay
-Excellent developer support

MINUS
-Small number of official scenarios
-Repetitive