Preview by: Dave VanDyk

There's just something about space combat that I find alluring and magical. Watching two gigantic capital ships square off against each other with enough ordinance to punch two holes in a small moon fills one with a sense of tragic awe; a well-placed torpedo takes out an entire deck and sends vital crew members spiraling into space, highly focused particle beams sweep across an opposing ship's shields in the hope of finding a weak point, and crewmembers desperately work their workstations, trying to ignore the overwhelming fear that their console may explode at any second.

For years we've observed such clashes in Star Trek, Star Wars, and of course Battlestar Galactica on an epic scale, so it’s just common sense to think that someone would eventually create a game based entirely around this sort of thing, doesn't it?

Well, that someone is Cliff Harris, former Lionhead Studios AI coder and the man behind Gratuitous Space Battles, a game so confident in its intentions that it has no need to hide behind a fancy-pants title. After spending some time horsing around with a beta version of the game, the only way I see to define it is to call it 'a tinkerer's dream'. If you're the kind of person who tends to spend far more time screwing around with your fleet formations, orders, and custom ship designs than actually watching stuff blow up, this game is definitely for you. The entire point is to spend time customizing your own glorious, customized fleet of warships, and then send them into battle to see what happens. After a series of (inevitable) defeats, you'll then go back to the drawing board to try, try again.

Sure - if spending a bunch of time trying to figure out the difference between a Fusion Beam and a Proton Beam doesn't sound appealing, the game does throw a few stock designs your way so that you can just allocate a bunch of random ships into a battle, hit "Go", and watch the action happen - but in doing this, you'll miss out on the game's true charm (and probably lose the battle too).

From the handy ship designer interface, you can select a desired chassis (ranging from a few different classifications, such as fighters, frigates, and cruisers) and then start loading it down with equipment modules and weapons. Each chassis type has its own little set of advantages and downsides; some will support mounts for more weapons and fewer equipment modules, or others might come with passive bonuses such as stronger hull plating, all of which can affect what kind of role your ship will be able to play in the battle.