Daily Mac App: Gratuitous Space Battles

Daily Mac App: Gratuitous Space Battles

Do you like space battles? Do you like explosions? Do you like strategy games? Gratuitous Space Battles is worth a look, then. While it isn’t perfect, I’ve spent hours playing this game because it is so much fun to zoom in to a battle and see tiny fighter ships flying around gigantic space cruisers. But first let me describe how Gratuitous Space Battles works.

You play the role of a fleet commander, and must create a fleet from somewhat limited resources. In fact, you actually “build” your ships based on a set of weapons and subsystems, and you place theses on a variety of ship chassis that range from tiny fighters to huge cruisers. You position your fleet, give a few orders (generally non-specific orders but you can set parameters to tweak the automatons piloting your ships) and set the battle in motion. During battle, which can be sped up or paused, you are a passive observer — but that’s the point. The idea is that you’ll watch your wind-up toys duke it out and scoot around the screen, as you zoom and pan to watch the mayhem. As you win battles you’re allowed to “buy” more powerful or efficient systems for your ships, and even unlock other races, which provide a variety of ship configurations to build upon.

Gratuitous Space Battles is an interesting mix of strategy and resource management. As you move around and zoom in/out you’re treated to some great visuals and sounds. For example, zooming in you’ll see each fighter (tiny compared to cruisers) flying around, shooting and you’ll hear the sounds of each weapon and explosions aplenty. It’s great fun to watch this unfold. Still, your fleet is on autopilot. You cannot change orders during battle. This is an unfortunate flaw, but it forces you to think more carefully about the orders you give before battle. I’d like to see a more thorough set of orders as well, however, as you cannot target specific enemy ships, as a strike team would do. In fact, early on you may become frustrated as your ships do some dumb things. But I found that if you experiment with the orders and create teams within your fleet, you stand a much better chance of simulating an AI. If you stick to merely placing your ships with default commands you will not be pleased with your dimwitted captains fleeing battle once their damage gets too low!

Despite these shortcomings Gratuitous Space Battles is fun, and even more fun to watch. I recommend pausing before jumping from fleet placement to battle, as that’s when the app tends to crash. But once you see what’s going on during battle you’ll see why this game is processor intensive. Each weapon has a damage counter, each ship has a plan, and all of these details can be seen when you zoom in. Or zoom way out to see the bigger picture. You cannot zoom out to see the entire battle at once, however.