Review: Gratuitous Space Battles (PC)

Mymain complaint with Teleglitch (other than it being bastard-hard and just outright hating me) was that it failed to really give me any feedback, and I suppose I could say the same thing about Gratuitous Space Battles. GSB is another well-reviewed game that went on to spawn a number of DLC packs and, later, a tank-filled sequel. I got the original game in some super-cheap bundle, was really excited about it, really, really tried to like it for about five hours of play, and then completely gave up.

Apparently, it's a really deep strategy game worthy of lots of brow-beetling and micromanagement (which normally I very much enjoy); however, I had a real hard time understanding how I was expected to be involved in playing the game at all since it refused to ever tell me anything.

Just like women! Right, guys? Am I right or what? Huh? HUH?! Shopping.

The original GSM is, essentially, just a series of battles you choose to fight in whatever order from a menu. The weird thing (to me, at least) about GSB is that you spend lots and lots of time preparing for each of these battles designing ships, customizing preexisting ships, orienting ships and placing them on a grid, and then you click “GO” and watch the battle fight itself. I don't necessarily expect a lot of verisimilitude in my gaming (Minecraft is one of my favorite games), but this is not how battles work. In fact, the entire understanding of modern warfare is based on hierarchies, chain of command, and dissemination of orders that change on a minute-to-minute or second-to-second basis. Strike one against GSM is that it creates a hypothetical battlefield in which each soldier is given his/her own equipment and set of orders and turned loose with no way to recall that soldier or to organize sets of soldiers into specific formations.

For example, unless I'm a complete idiot, there's no way to make your tiny, fragile fighters hold off from drawing a big enemy cruiser's fire (for the purposes of having your cruiser sidle up alongside it unmolested) until your cruiser gets into an advantageous position. Instead, what happens every time is that your fighters (faster fliers, by nature) jet out ahead and get massacred before your big ships can even cover the distance to the enemy fleet. By putting the fighters behind the rest of my formation, I increased the amount of distance they had to cover and thus could approximate the effect I wanted, but shit. Seriously. Back when all we had were horses and big pieces of metal to hit each other with, armies didn't have to put the horses in the back of the formation to keep them from running in a straight line right into the enemy lines ahead of the rest of the army. Because we had mouths and ears and could tell soldiers to wait until it was time to attack. That the game simulates this kind of illogically weird battlefield makes it hard to learn and made me not terribly inclined to bother with it after a few hours.

The killer, though, was the lack of feedback during and between battles. The ship-building and fleet-arranging screens let you customize the pre-battle to a ridiculous level of detail (and this probably really appeals to a certain type of gamer). However, once you get into the battle, there's just a lot of flashy explosions and status bars that correspond to each ship's hull integrity and really no way to tell if the fighter-seeking missiles you bought are working or if that second beam-shield you installed on your cruiser is making it die less fast. It's absolutely the feeling of turning in a detailed, nuanced essay at the end of a 15-week college course just to get it returned with a “B+” marked on the front page and nothing else. When I won, I didn't know why I won. When I lost, I didn't know why I lost. I play a lot of video games. It shouldn't be this hard for me to understand how the game communicates feedback to me. Therefore, I have to conclude the feedback just isn't being communicated.

And that sucks, because building the fleets is pretty fun, and I imagine that over the course of the campaign, as one creates and saves more and more custom layouts, that it provides a pretty good feeling of actually creating something clever. Too bad the game really doesn't have any way of rewarding you for that cleverness.