Gratuitous in Every Way
It's strange to review this game so late after its release, but the announcement of Gratuitous Tank Battles allowed me to plunge back into its older space-based predecessor. Right away, Gratuitous Space Battles presents itself as a narrowly focused space strategy and simulation eschewing nearly all forms of user control during battle in favor of AI commands, formations, and spaceship building before the battle begins. The feeling of sending a huge fleet that you painstakingly designed is exhilarating. It's hard not to enjoy the battle in all its glory when you can see every action you have set up work perfectly in carving up another fleet through lasers, missiles, and plasma.
It's a testament to how compelling the simple gameplay actually is when the game's flaws present itself almost immediately. Cliff Harris himself points out the main problem: Gratuitous Space Battles is hard to master and hard to learn. The game never quite reaches the same level as other strategy games precisely because of its fiddly nature. It often takes an excruciatingly long time to fully set up a fleet: designing each ship, juggling costs, choosing AI commands, and placing each ship. Often, a gimmicky fleet exploiting some minor unbalance can defeat most single player campaigns and make online downloaded challenges a matter of designing the "rock" to defeat the "scissors."
If you appreciate strategy games and just like watching space ships pound each other into oblivion then give Gratuitous Space Battles a try. Otherwise it’s definitely not a game for everyone.