Gratuitous Space Battles - PC Game Previews


	Platform PC Genre Strategy Publisher TBA Developer Positech Games ETA TBA
Newsletter
Be notified of site updates. Sign-up for the Newsletter sent out twice weekly. Enter E-Mail Address Below: Subscribe \| Unsubscribe

Gratuitous Space Battles

If there is any consequence to the release of Star Wars upon the collective consciousness that hasn't been looked at closely or already recognized and analyzed to death, it is the innovation in sci-fi movies (and subsequently other visual media) of multiple ships on the screen at once engaging in battle. To be fair, Star Trek implied space combat in a number of episodes, but cutting from the Enterprise firing phasers or photon torpedoes to the other ship firing their own weapons isn't what you would call a gripping action sequence. Star Wars seems to have gotten

Advertisement

in the first fully realized space battles and the world has never been the same since. Without that, later iterations of Star Trek, the two iterations of Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and countless computer games would never have had the punch they have now. No Wing Commander? No Sins Of A Solar Empire? Horrors!

Into this arena comes the one man indie outfit

Advertisement

Positech Games. Rather than twiddle around with planetary development and interstellar empire building, their upcoming game Gratuitous Space Battles gets right down to the fighting. You're given a series of templates which contain a specific number of slots to hold weapons, armor, shields, engines, and assorted gadgets. Loading up the frame with the biggest guns is not an option. You need to balance power and crew usage against your intended load out and you will have to make compromises. Success in battle gives you honor. Honor allows you to unlock new weapons systems and gadgets, which allows you to overhaul your ships, which allows you defeat stronger enemies, which allows you to get more honor, and so on.

Having played around with the beta for a little while now, I'm finding this to be an interesting little game. Rather than being able to directly control your fleets, you set orders prior to deployment. You can change a few orders here and there during the battle, but once the fleet is deployed, it's more or less on its own. Scenarios dictate which enemy fleet you'll be facing off against and what the prevailing "local conditions" are like, which might prohibit you from using fighter craft or render your shields inoperative.

Visually, the game is impressive. Although it is represented in a top down 2D view, the ships are quite striking, the special effects are eye catching, and the backgrounds definitely hit the mark to convey the idea of battle in deep space.

There are two potential weaknesses that I see which hopefully will be changed before the game is commercially released. The first involves the order system once you've deployed. The ability to pause the game is a wonderful thing and should give armchair admirals plenty of time to issue updated orders. However, the issuing of orders is handled entirely by keyboard shortcuts. Adding a few buttons on the UI for mid-battle orders shouldn't be terribly hard, and will likely go a long way towards making combat more enjoyable.

The second potential problem relates to what you can see, or what you can't see, about the enemy ships. The level of detail in the game is such that you can zoom in and see the weapon emplacements inboard your ships and your enemies. In theory, this should be enough to help you identify what weapons the enemy is using against you, so that if you get your head handed to you, you can adjust your designs and fight again. In practice, it means you have to either accept fighting more or less blind, accept multiple hideous defeats in a scenario, or you create a massive spreadsheet with every conceivable enemy design you encounter. The ability to scan an enemy ship and get a look at its loadout, or the ability to have the design revealed piece by piece as it fires weapons and takes damage, would remove a great deal of potential frustration when going through the scenarios.

There's a lot to like about Gratuitous Space Battles. Whether it can appeal to a large audience or only cater to a small one remains to be seen.

- Axel Cushing

(November 8, 2009)