It's strange to review this game so late after its release,
but the announcement of Gratuitous Tank Battles allowed me to plunge back into
its older space-based predecessor. Right away, Gratuitous Space Battles
presents itself as a narrowly focused space strategy and simulation eschewing
nearly all forms of user control during battle in favor of AI commands,
formations, and spaceship building before the battle begins. The feeling of
sending a huge fleet that you painstakingly designed is exhilarating. It's hard
not to enjoy the battle in all its glory when you can see every action you have
set up work perfectly in carving up another fleet through lasers, missiles, and
plasma.
It's a testament to how compelling the simple gameplay actually is when the
game's flaws present itself almost immediately. Cliff Harris himself points out
the main problem: Gratuitous Space Battles is hard to master and hard to learn.
The game never quite reaches the same level as other strategy games precisely
because of its fiddly nature. It often takes an excruciatingly long time to
fully set up a fleet: designing each ship, juggling costs, choosing AI
commands, and placing each ship. Often, a gimmicky fleet exploiting some minor
unbalance can defeat most single player campaigns and make online downloaded
challenges a matter of designing the "rock" to defeat the
"scissors."
If you appreciate strategy games and just like watching space ships pound each other into oblivion then give Gratuitous Space Battles a try. Otherwise it’s definitely not a game for everyone.