Gratuitous Space Battles – Review (PC)
When I was growing up as a child, I was fascinated with Star Wars and all things science fiction. I would design my own starships out of legos, and dream of being an astronaut or captain of a space ship. Nearly 30 years later, Positech games has made the game I wish I could have played as a kid.
Gratuitous Space Battles is a strategy game unlike anything you have seen before. You spend most of your time designing space ships from 40 different hull designs, and over 120 weapons and modifications. You start off with the bare minimum to win the tutorial missions but the more battles you win, the more currency you earn to unlock upgrades.
After you have designed your ships, you select a mission and place your fleet into formation on a grid based battlefield opposite your enemy , you have a final chance to give individual orders to ships such as telling frigates to protect capitol ships and fighters to attack enemies who are on their last legs. Once your satisfied with your Armada and their orders, you click to have the computer take over and start the battle. It’s at this point that a Gratuitous Space Battle plays out in front of your eyes. You have no control over your fleet, you can only watch as the battle commences to see how your designs and orders hold up against the opposition.
More times than not early on, the enemy will stomp on your head, but you will have earned upgrades and valuable experience to tweak and redesign your ships and to perfect the orders they carry out. This is the purest example of a great strategy game. It’s almost like rock, paper scissors on space steroids. (I could have said asteroids there but I didn’t).
Gratuitous Space Battles has a civilizationesque addictive quality, that will suck you in and not let go until hours have passed. There are 4 unlockable races and multiple difficulties to masters, as well as online play against other human players. Think of the ultimate chess match played with photons, lasers and missiles, instead of rooks, knights and bishops. Once you design your ultimate fleet, you can upload it to the main servers for other players to take on, and your uploaded fleet’s win loss record is kept for you.
My favorite part of 4X games, was always building ships and having them fight other ships, which kind of makes Gratuitous Space Battles the ultimate strategy game for space geeks like me. The battles have incredible graphics, the strategy is deep and the soundtrack is reminiscent of the score from the prequel star wars trilogy.The only real issue i had with this game is the lack of narrative in the single player mission and maybe some more variety in hull designs, which i am sure could be remedied with dlc at a future date. If your are a strategy fan, you absolutely must play this game and at $19.99 on Steam, it’s an absolute steal and a must buy. Gratuitous Space Battles gets a 9 out of 10.
Gratuitous Space Battles
Publisher: Positech Games
MSRP: $19.99
Available Now: PC, Steam
System Requirements
OS: Windows XP or Vista
Processor: 1.5 GHz processor
Memory: 1GB
Graphics: 3D Card with 128MB video memory
DirectX®: 9.0c
Hard Drive: 300 MB
Sound: Any
