Gratuitous Space Battles has been released by UK developer Positech Games. According to the developers, the game is “a strategy / management / simulation game that gets straight to the meat and potatoes of science-fiction games : The big space battles fought by huge spaceships with tons of laser beams and things going ‘zap!’, ‘ka-boom!’ and ‘ka-pow!’”
The game is played from a 2D top-down perspective, putting the player in charge of an armada of customisable spaceships. The pre-battle screen tasks the player with strategically choosing their battle fleet, and the equipment it will deploy. The player will have to balance equipment costs with power requirements, crew members, weapons, defence as well as overall weight.
Once the battle fleet and equipment has been chosen, the player arranges their ships on the battle grid, in preparation for the gratuitous battle. Ships can also be given tactical orders before each battle, such as to retreat when certain damage levels are reached or fight to the death.
AI behaviours can also be controlled, having ships escort and protect valuable assets for example. Satisfied with the deployment, the player can lean back in true form of a starship admiral to watch the destruction unfold.
Visually, there are three ship ‘races’ to choose from. The various ships have a base model upon which the numerous equipment choices are represented. Players can zoom to differing levels to view everything from the large motherships to the small fighters as they duke it out across the screen.
The sound effects are well rounded and the soundtrack lends a suitably epic atmosphere to the carnage as it unfolds. Lots of explosions, lasers and missiles flash across the screen as the ships and fighters are blown into space debris. The developers claim that the game “runs fine on relatively old PC’s.”
The game focuses on a single player experience, but does have a multiplayer mechanism of sorts. Players can upload a battle fleet configuration for a particular mission to the Positech servers. This configuration can then be used by other players to play that mission. Statistics from their attempts are collected and put on display on the Website.
According to the developers, “GSB is likely to appeal to any lovers of big space battles or people who enjoyed space strategy games such as Starfleet Command, Battleships Forever, Galactic Civilizations, Masters of Orion, Imperium Galactica, Sins of a Solar Empire or the Space Empires games.”
The game is currently sold for US$22.99 (±R170) on the Positech website, R178.57 on Impulse andUS$19.95 (±R147) on Direct2Drive. The game will be available on Steam from 16 November 2009, but there is no indication of price just yet.
Watch the Gratuitous Space Battles trailer
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