Author - Jerry Paxton

One of the more interesting games coming down the pipe in the near future is Positech Games’ Gratuitous Space Battles. GSB allows players to customize various space craft types and pit their fleets against others in various combat scenarios. But in this seemingly simply concept, there is quite a bit of complexity.

Customizing your ships begins with selecting what ship chassis you want to load out. Ships are classified into three categories (the retail game may add more, time will tell): Fighters, Frigates, and Cruisers. Even different chassis in the same ship class will differ with regards to numbers of hardpoints and other bonuses such as hull or shield modifiers. After choosing your chassis you will begin loading out the ship with various technologies. Will you create a dedicated missile platform, or perhaps an anti-fighter ship? The choice is really up to you and makes for many fun hours of tinkering to get it just right… (cont.)
(cont.) Battling enemy fleets is mostly a hands-off affair. After you setup your initial fleet composition and formation you are just along for the ride. While some might feel this is boring – not being able to interact with your ship captains at all, I enjoyed the idea that my fleets were operating independently of my control. I could sit back and enjoy the fireworks, as it were. So many times did one fleet come back from near defeat or pull some very surprising maneuvering to out flank the enemy – it really is exciting to watch. On the other hand, my fleets also got their chronometers cleaned several times as well.

Visually, GSB is crisp and detailed. Weapon effects are really snappy and unique dependent on the type being fired while the shield effects provide a useful cue as to their status. You even get some nifty motion blurs and camera shaking where appropriate as battles unfold. As previously mentioned, ships come in three flavors: fighters, frigates, and cruisers. No word yet on if we can expect larger/different types in the final product but we will keep you posted. Also the only playable faction in the beta version is the Federation – the final version will undoubtedly have more to choose from, as can be seen in the factions of the enemy fleets you fight against in the beta version.

The in-game audio is very well done, which is really saying something, as with all the ships on your screen at once there are a ton of sound effects running simultaneously. Also, all of the weapon types have their own sound effects (blasters sound different than phasors, etc), so you can imagine Positech Games has put a lot of effort into the audio of the product.

Overall, Gratuitous Space Battle is already a blast to play with very little in the way of bugs and we can’t wait to see how the finished product turns out.