Gratuitous Space Battles

5 A game for hardcore perfectionists
Summary: In this game you design fleets, deploy them, and then sit back and watch them duke it out with an enemy fleet. The standard game comes with a series of scenario battles that you can replay as many times as you like, each time you improve your performance you earn points to spend on new ship hulls and parts to use in the ship design screen. In addition to this there is a more recent campaign mode expansion where you move fleets between planets and try to conquer the entire map.

Views:

This graphically, one of the best 2d video games around. The explosions, ship models and chaos of battle is beautifully rendered.

Billed as a casual game, this game is in fact very hardcore. The interface and ship design is reasonably casual compared with 4x games but the game play is tough. You will need to test out dozens of different fleet and ship setups to tease out the most effective. This is what the game is about, grinding out the best performing fleets. I would recommend the demo to anyone.

The scenarios provide fleet testing ground, where if you loose you can make small modifications and try again. The campaign mode is far less merciful. Each time you fight a battle, the game downloads a fleet from an internet database (based upon your fleet size and the stage of the campaign you are in) and pitches it against you. This is not a true turn based strategy where you play an AI, but rather a campaign context for more varied battles.

The price in my view is a bit steep for a casual game, if you like hardcore games, and tactical perfectionism then this game is for you.

3 Decent Concept, Ruined by Randomness
I like the concept and overall design of the game – you set up your fleet, give them orders, and see what happens. But the results of the battle have a hefty chunk of randomness in them – maybe you had a good fleet made but just got unlucky, who knows?

If there was no randomness in the combat results, this would be a drastically improved game. It’s not like random factors are inherently bad, but when the entire game is perfecting a fleet and seeing the results, randomness destroys the fun of that because you’ll have to run the same fleet half a dozen times to actually know how well it can perform – completely tedious and boring.