GSB plays out somewhat like many classic 4x space strategy games, without three of the X'es and with that four X, the space combat, seriously zoomed in on. The amount of detail in ship design is pretty engrossing. You are free to make quite a few design decisions in the context of the game. You can go heavy on the weapons and light on defense, you can pile on the defensive capabilities and create a behemoth that is very difficult to take down but can only plink away at your enemies. While playing with the game I've tried several different ship and fleet design strategies, most of which haven't exactly panned out for me yet. I'm still learning and there's a bit to learn to master the game.
The overall gameplay mechanic is relatively simple. You deploy your fleets against a computer enemy in a dozen or so stock battles. The size of the battle field varies and conditions may be present to tweak the game play, like no shields or reduced weapon ranges. You have a finite number of pilots, resources, etc to throw at the battle which are consumed as you add ships to your fleet. If you a win a battle you are rewarded honor points which you can use to unlock different ship chasis, upgraded weapons and other bits including other races of which there are four.
The tweak is that the amount of honor you get for winning is relative to how many resources you threw into the fight. That is, the smaller or less expensive your fleet the more glorious your victory and the more rewarding it is. So even once you've 'beaten' the game you could still go back and do better by eliminating the same enemy with a smaller fleet, or simply at a higher level of difficulty. In other words, for a small game, if the bug bites you there's a lot of replayability. Overall I'm finding the game play rather enjoyable despite the fact that I'm actually terrible at it. However there's really no penalty for losing so trying the same scenario over and over again, slightly tweaking my ships and fleet with each try is easy to do. The game makes it easy by allowing you save your ship designs, save your fleet deployments and surrender and start over at any time.
Most recently I've been toying with the idea of mixing special purpose ships into my fleet. For example, if the enemy is going to be sending a ton fighters I will sprinkle my fleet with my special purpose anti-fighter ships which have lots of tractor beams to grab enemy fighters so the other ships in the fleet can kill them. Below, my anti-figher ship design in action, tractoring fighters like crazy.
Unfortunately it hasn't really worked for me, the fighters are still savaging my fleet, the savaging just ends a little sooner than it would otherwise. So back to the drawing board. Other bad ideas included the fleet of fast, unarmored laser beam frigates.
Looks cool but they explode very quickly. Which leads me to the next point about this game, the explosions! Simply put he space battles live up to the name and are truly gratuitous. The weaponry flying around, the explosions, the debris, everything about the visuals are over the top and simply awesome. Screenshots don't really do this game justice, you have to play it to understand just how much awesomeness is thrown on the screen at once. The audio is quite good as well, adding to the game really well without distracting.
The game does include an online aspect as well. You can download challenges and pit your fleets against those designed by others, additionally you can issue your own challenges. It would be incredibly satisfying to be one of those guys that submits a challenge that has a very high win/loss ratio against all the other GSB players. I'm not one of them, not yet anyway.
Overall I'm greatly pleased with this game. It's another excellent indie developer game (basically one guy from the UK working on it) and well worth the $20. I've got about four or five hours into it already and it's captured my imagination and I'm just having a lot of fun playing it. With the handwaving lately about how PC gaming is dead I think GSB is a solid bit of proof that, once again, the pundits are wrong. It's not dead, it's just changing, which it's always done and always will do.
GSB can be found online at Positech Games:
http://www.positech.co.uk/gratuitousspacebattles/index2.html
Currently the game is still in beta and there is no demo available just yet, however for $20 you can get into the beta now and receive the release version when its done. Anyone who love sci-fi, explosions and crafting their own destiny could hardly go wrong.
