Review by: Dave VanDyk

The aptly-named Gratuitous Space Battles is a game for tinkerers. From the name, you could extrapolate that it focuses primarily on one thing - the act of watching spaceships explode - and while such an assumption wouldn't be too far off-target, you also can't overlook the game's versatile customization options and wealth of (hilariously described) parts and weapons which deceptively make up the bulk of the gameplay experience.

While you could try to slot this game into your standard-fare definition of an "RTS", such a description would actually be pretty inaccurate. True, the action takes place from a top-down, two dimensional perspective, and yes there's an interface for issuing orders to your ships and watching them go to work, but the reality is that the game is more of a "planning" simulator. This is because most of your time will not be spent cheering from the sidelines as you watch your mighty fleet get tangled up in an epilepsy-inducing furball of lasers and missiles, but instead will be invested figuring out things like if a Fusion Beam really is more suitable for your choice of tactics than a Proton Beam or if you should occupy that one last equipment slot with an extra slab of armor plating, or a point defense scanner.

This is because once a given battle commences, you actually have no direct control over your fleet and instead can only sit back and hope that your fleet has been configured sufficiently to ensure victory. Since I know the lack of "hands-on" control over a battle is something that will immediately turn away quite a few gamers, let me justify this by saying that the game is damn pretty - if not one of the prettiest 2D games to grace my PC. As you watch a battle unfold, both fleets will start on opposing sides of a map and begin converging (based on their assigned strategies). Once within weapons range, ships will visibly angle their turrets to draw a bead on their chosen targets and open fire, with dramatic missile flares and beam weapons arcing their way across open space.

Then, as swarms of fighters converge and the distance between capital ships closes, the explosions begin. Shields flare and struggle to deflect the onslaught of energy being directed their way, armored hull plating burns bright red following a slew of direct impacts, and massive blasts of flame and smoke begin pluming away from a ship's hull once its defenses are breached, leaving a charred, flaming piece of debris where the last piece of weapons fire hit. From a graphical standpoint, combat is so incredibly over the top and dramatic that you can't help but be completely swept away after seeing it for the first time.

That's the key reason why the game works, and why it will appeal so strongly to sci-fi nerds (like me) who base their own personal religions around series like Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Not only do you finally get a chance to re-create the kinds of battles seen in these shows as much as you want, but you can have a hand in the advanced design and planning of the engagement to improve your odds in the challenges ahead of you. The game throws a little over ten different challenges your way (plus a tutorial level and a couple of 'survival' challenges that send constant waves of enemies at you), all of which have their own little theme and twists - including spatial anomalies, which add variables such as negating the use of fighters, reducing the effectiveness of weapons, or even completely eliminating the use of shields.

When you load up any of these missions, you're presented with a deployment screen. From here you can select from a list of ship designs at your disposal and use a simplified drag-and-drop interface to place them onto a starting grid on the map. Once thusly placed, you could hit the "Deploy" button right away and jump straight into the action, but then you won't be able to take advantage of the game's behavioral scripting. For each ship, you can define how likely they'll be to engage Fighter, Frigate, or Cruiser-sized vessels (and at what ideal range), as well as give explicit orders to escort or form with ship X, or focus only on enemy vessels that other ships are already firing upon. Using these options and careful formations of ships, you can come up with all sorts of crafty tactics.