Review by: Tom Chick

When you play the excellent Gratuitous Space Battles, you can’t help but wonder how cool it would be without the gratuitous part. You know, if these lovely real time battles were part of a larger strategy game instead of just self-contained scoring challenges. Well, wonder no more! The Galactic Conquest add-on amply demonstrates that these gratuitous space battles are better off left gratuitous.

The idea behind Galactic Conquest is promising. It's a turn-based strategy context for the real time battles, similar to the games in the Total War series. You build up a fleet that can best fight a series of battles across a map. Because you’ll be fighting various foes, you can’t just bring in ships tailor-made to defeat one set of opponents, which is how Gratuitous Space Battles normally works. So you need some flexibility. You need variety in your ship designs and fleet compositions. As you win battles, you capture planets with factories and recruiting stations that determine the amount of money you can spend and the number of pilots and crew you can recruit. You also have to deal with damaged ships. You have to replace losses. You have to build new fleets at shipyards and bring them to the front. Some systems have anomalies that change how the battles play out. For instance, you might have an important bottleneck where fighters aren't allowed or where shields don't work.

But right off the bat, something is terribly wrong. Galactic Conquest is balanced so that you won’t make any progress until you pound on the “end turn” button several dozen times, saving up your resources to buy a much bigger fleet. This is true even at the easiest difficulty level. But nowhere does the game tell you this. In fact, something called a threat meter -- what it’s actually measuring is never explained -- fills up on your planet. You might think Galactic Conquest is telling you to hurry up and move out! So until you figure out that your first move should be to wait for a very long time, this will be a game about being soundly defeated over and over again.

Your opponents are randomized from one planet to the next, so you never get any sense for whom you’re fighting, or why there are a given number of them. Even worse, there is zero information about what’s waiting for you at the other end of a wormhole. It’s a die roll that can put you in hopeless situations so you’ll have to reload an earlier saved game. Except that there aren’t any earlier saved games. Galactic Conquest autosaves to keep you from trying again. Suck it up and deal with your losses, or say uncle and restart.

You only get a single static map, and you start from the same place every time you play. There is no context for any of Gratuitous Space Battles’ wonderful races. Here’s the Tribe, there are the Swarm, and next door you might find the Empire or the rebels. There is no sense of place in the Galactic Conquest map. There is only a series of punishingly difficult battles with the threat of an impossible-to-win game-ending beatdown at the other end of every wormhole. In fact, you’d be better off just playing a series of battles to try to get a high score. Which is exactly how Gratuitous Space Battles played before you tried this misbegotten attempt at context.