In space no one can hear you scream...well unless that is you are right next to them in which case its to late for you.
Now with that out of the way lets get back to the review. In this game it challenges players with defeating opposing space fleets through careful pre-battle planning. For each skirmish or engagement, the player has a fixed budget and a maximum number of pilots. This means if you have a small amount to spend you can put it all into a single huge ship or two and hope they have the firepower to deal with what is thrown at you or you could got with more smaller ships..The choice is yours. There are various other limitations or rules which influence the outcome of the battle. For example, a given environment may reduce the effectiveness of ship shields, or may reduce weapon ranges. Players must take this information into account when selecting and positioning the ships that form their own fleet. Once players have selected their ships and issued orders to the ships concerning how to engage the enemy fleet, the battle begins. The battle itself proceeds completely without human interaction, with the outcome being determined entirely based on the data, rather than on player reflexes or mid-battle decisions. So you have to be very very carefull with your tactics and your choices because brute force dose not always rule the day.
Also in Gratuitous Space Battles the game encourages players to win battles using as few resources as possible by awarding honor for any unspent funds. That is, for each point of budgetary allocation which a player could have spent but did not, a point of honor is awarded upon victory. The game tracks the maximum honor previously awarded per battle at each difficulty level, so players can continue to earn more only by beating their previous best. After amassing a sufficient quantity of honor, it can then be traded to unlock new ship modules, new ship hull configurations, and new playable alien races. Which again another choice has to be made...do you go all out to ensure a win or do you hold back in hopes of getting enough points to unlock a new weapon or ship hull?
Seeing as Gratuitous Space Battles consists solely of combat in space it gives players a great deal of flexibility in how ships are designed. For a given playable race, players have a number of hull configurations from which to choose, made up of three different sizes of ships fighters, frigates, and cruisers. Different ship hulls have different numbers of mounting points for modules and weapons, as well as having various inherent characteristics in the form of overall bonuses in specific areas. Players must balance ship cost, weight, speed, power, crew, and offense/defense capabilities in deciding what combat role a given spacecraft will fulfill. So again more choices have to be made...Do you outfitt your forces to be super protected so that no mater what the other fleet does it can never take you down or do you go all out and try a set up that will finish them off before they do to much damage to you...?
Gratuitous Space Battles came out for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux on November 17, 2009.
The System Requirements are:
For the PC:
OS: Windows XP or Vista.
Processor: 1.5 GHz processor.
Memory: 1GB.
Graphics: 3D Card with 128MB video memory.
DirectX®: 9.0c.
Hard Drive: 300 MB.
For the Mac:
OS: OS X version Leopard 10.5.8, Snow Leopard 10.6.3, or later.
Processor: Intel 1 Ghz.
Memory: 512 MB.
Graphics: 32MB video card.
Hard Drive: 75 MB.
Gratuitous Space Battles is a game that can take some time to get use to and you have to put a little time into working out what will work best and being ready to change things up when it is called for. But at the end of the day this is a game well worth its money and well worth the time to enjoy.