Very enjoyable watching my fleet destroying the enemy fleet. It takes a while to figure out the best way to play, and once you figure it out, the fun starts. Starting from this game, Positech became one of my favourite indie game devs.

The number of hours I've logged in this game should give you an idea of how replayable this is IF you like this kind of game, which I obviously do :3

How I would describe the game:

-a couple or handful of hours of campaign, which really equates to; getting you used to the game mechanics
-then you have custom campaigns, this is where all of my time has gone; the numerous combinations of ships to create your fleets are absolutely fantastic, there are tons of commands to program into the ships, tons of balancing to do while creating your ships, revisions, reasons for 'special mission' ships, and best of all you are going up against fleets created by other users

Quite obviously, I recommend this, but only for the people who love strategy (and the weapons/shields/ships have a very star trekky feel, which may influence some in one way or another.)

Want to blast things into space dust? This is your game.

Want a deep plot and rich characters? These things are not here, because BLOW STUFF UP!!!

Explosions: YES
Rockets: YES
Lasers: YES
More SciFi guns: YES
Plot: BARF!
Story line: NOT NEEDED

Buy: YES.

Never thought that creating ships to blow alien ships up for no apparent reason or logic whatsoever could be so fun! :D

What you basically do is to design ships which, when deployed in battle, will help defeat the enemy fleet. Every victory you win will give you a credit like reward called Honour. You use this 'Honour' to buy new shiny gadgets or weapons that blaze nice looking beams of death onto your enemy.

There is no actual story line. The game is basically composed of about 10-15 setups (forgot the actual number while writing this :/) which all offer a different challenge along with a certain species to go against. This means that just because your ship designs and the fleet you deployed were successful against a certain race in such a scenario, doesn't mean that you will be as successful in another scenario with a different species. Not to mention certain scenarios having something called 'Spartial Anomalies' which can affect how well/poor your ships perform in terms of their weapons and defences.

There is also a multiplayer mode which tbh isnt what you actually think, it isnt a match-up with another player, see who wins and say "HAHA YOU SUCK!" kind of game. No, how it works, is that you mainly pick your map and make your own scenario, deploy your ships that you designed and upload them. The scenario is then uploaded to a vast list of scenarios for the community to try out. Some may even consider retaliating your challenge. However i would just recommend trying out created scenarios to try out since there is a vast list of uploads that there is only a small chance of someone actually trying it out your own.

With every game however, it has its drawbacks...

Not counting the DLC, you may find it fustrating when you find yourself losing and on the recieving end of super intense beams of destruction blowing your stuff to smithereens, again and again. After the battle you are shown stats which are near impossible to understand, so you may end up in a repeating scenario of losing, losing, losing, then after more losing looking at the stats in attempt to study what is wrong, make new ship designs, still lose, go back to the drawing board, still lose and then wondering why the hell you cannot win when you study the stats for almost an hour. Also without the DLC you may end up finding yourself bored with just 4 races at your disposal, one of which you cannot fight on the single player mission scenarios.

As a result you may find yourself thinking that you wasted your money on a game you cannot understand and find out how little content you had. I would advice buying this game when there is some sort of sale or deal going on with this game. Buy with the DLC expansions too to give the game a little more spice to your experience with the game. That and a lot of patience with the losing and looking up for tips on certain situations and you may end up actually coming back to this every now and then.

Despite these flaws, GSB is quite a fun little game to kill an hour or so...just don't expect to fall in love with all the info you are bombarded with at the end of the battle. Again i would advise getting the DLC's as they include an extra 6 races to try and mess around with and a Galactic Campaign, though i would avoid not getting to engrossed in that too much due to the Galactic Campaign having some flaws, but the rest should keep you occupied with this game for even longer.

It may have moments where you say ♥♥♥♥ THIS GAME, ♥♥♥♥ ITS MECHANICS, I WANT MY MONEY BACK!, but stick to it and hopefully in the end you will be glad you bought this game along with the DLC's.

Despite its flaws which may end up annoying you with stats and at times fleets that make you think this is all impossible to understand, but overtime it can be really fun to play, maybe you could one day decide to play out of rage and take out your anger on a bunch of aliens who have no reason to be blown up whatsoever, except for your entertainment of zero-g fireworks!

7/10

Its a very fun game I enjoy testing out some of my concept ideas. Although I would really like to see some weapon improvements in the game beyond what they already have.

Fun game, just be aware that not all the DLC are available for all platforms. I rebought this on Steam to play on my mac and I can only play half the content! Not exactly sure why this is, but I can't see the developers making all the DLC available when they are very much invested in the next installment.

Good, but with kicker as mentioned.

I enjoyed watching things blow up - especially A LOT OF THINGS blow up.

This is a fantastic game for those that love space battles, i love this game just for the fact that, it has a conquest mode and you can take planets and build even bigger forces... this game is worth the money spent.

I like watching swarms of Fighters. They're like mosquitos.

Pick this game up on a sale, it doesn't have enough content to justify its normal price tag. But when discounted, why not? You'll probably get a couple of hours fun out of it and it is very satisfying to see your fleet victorious, particularly when you're doing something stupid like taking on an enemy fleet using only a couple of cruisers or nothing but fighters and so on.

A little late to the party, but it happens. GSB is a blast to play, and I'm a big fan of any strategy or sim games--particularly those that reward careful planning and creativity. This game is centered around building a fleet and laying out a battle plan; the battles play out according to decisions made prior to the battle. A 'direct control' option is available to enable RTS-style control during battles, but this feels tacked on and the game shines when one avoids this option altogether.

GSB gives me the impression of building model space-ships from a box of purchased parts and then letting those toy ships destroy each other. Add in the mix of battling other peoples' fleets via downloadable challenges and a campaign system, and it's the ultimate nerdy space wars game.

Try out the demo; if you enjoy it, buying the full game is a no-brainer. While the various DLCs add some nice variety, they aren't necessary to play and enjoy the game.

overall a good game, but needs a tutorial for navigating the menus as they are not especially straightforward.

If you get this game, get the complete pack. If you already have this game, get the Campaign module. Without the Campaign aspect, the game is very limited and ultimatey you won't have much to do.

But with the campaign, while it is VERY limited to just building fleets and maintaining them (with no other 4X concerns; all structures are pre-built in any given system), it becomes a completely different game. Since the fleets are uploaded from players, you'll always hit new interesting configurations for specific systems; add in all the special per-system rules that you need specialized ships and the concern of maintaining supply lines for your fleets, and it becomes a pretty engrossing game that requires far more planning and leaves you with the threat that the next attacking fleet might have your number with a counter.

It's not perfect; I wish there were NPC factions and such in the 4X part with persistant forces for more strategic-level planning, but none the less, I've sunk hours into Campaign long after I previously gave up on the game. Still this is definitely got a game for people who enjoy designing ships as a central priority. If you do, it's on my easy list.

And a word on the dev pricing - that I agree on. The fact only one of the expansions is on a reasonable DLC sale right now is lame. $6-7 for a new faction is entirely too much and I think he'd earn more from halving the stock price and actually participating in Steam sales more. Still a fun game, if you grab campaign with the 75% off main game.

Wouldn't say it's worth full price of 15$, and it's disappointing that somehow the DLC isn't cross platform while the original game is.

In this game you can customize 3 classes of spaceships (fighters, frigates and cruisers) and change their weapons loadouts, armor thickness and shield strength (all about the tradeoffs). It comes with a few (10-ish) single player campaign missions and 3 races each with it's own set of ship hulls.

The learning curve is there but it's not steep, you can get away with skipping the tutorial. What you do in this game is you customize your ships, and on a budget with restricted amounts of pilots you deploy them into pre-determined battlezones, you customize the AI a little and then watch the battle ensue. You cannot manually control or micromanage ships while the battle is on-going, you must decide it all before the battle.

It's a unique but cool take on real time strategy. In space. You can expect to get anywhere between 3-10 hours from it depending on how fast you catch on to techniques for easy victories, and how much time you spend customizing your ships. For me, as soon as I'd unlocked all the modules and finished all the campaign missions, it was over. There wasn't even any lore to get into. I didn't have any interest in online play either.

Overall it was a decent and fun game, but I found it lacking in content (both mission quantity and amount of things to do for honor points. Once you've unlocked everything, there's no reward for winning battles any longer), not quite worth a 15$, but if you catch it on sale, it's worth at least one playthrough :)

The game incorporates interesting ideas and concepts, but the presentation of those is lacking. Even though you got a lot of customizing options, your choice doesn't have a severe enough impact on the battle result. As soon as you figure out the best setup for each ship and how to combine them, the game is a sequence of repetitive space battles you watch in fast forward.

As a standalone game (without DLC), Gratuitous Space Battles is mostly just an excercise in optimization - it isn't especially difficult to beat most of the missions with a generic all-around fleet, but you are only really rewarded for doing it with the least amount of cash.

The issue is, the feedback on how well you are doing is... lacking. There isn't a sandbox mode to quickly test fleets against each other, the after-battle graphs are impenetrably thick and there's no explanation I found for what "most effective" means, especially considering different weapons will have different uses (e.g. anti-fighter versus anti-shield versus anti-hull).

It's frankly a bit more of a mess than it needs to be.

By far the worst thing about this game is the way the developer tried to nickel-and-dime (or five-dollar-bill) us to death with minor, overpriced expansion packs that you pretty much needed to get if you wanted to keep participating in all the community had to offer. Now you can get the "Complete Pack" which is not a bad deal for newcomers but you don't want THIS one, which is the basic game.

The concept was actually fun and I got some good enjoyment out of it but unless I hear he's dropped his stupid revenue model, I don't plan to buy Gratuitous Space Battles 2. I got a bad enough taste in my mouth with how he handled the first one (if you bought every pack you'd end up paying like $15 for the base game + $42 for the DLC, so basically $57 for a game that is worth maybe $20 all total, relative to other Steam offerings. Those expansions do not contain $6 worth of new content.)

ok

Gratuitous Space Battles is a Pre-planning RTS game where you get to make your own units and make them face the ultimate challenge, blowing the other fleet up. There is no story, plot, or anything like that. There are no politics, and there is absolutely no diplomacy. There is only war, gratuitous war. Btw, it's kinda like Michael Bay made a space combat game. So, let's get to the review.

Pros:
- Graphics are amazing. From the debris to the freaking ship models, they all look great.
- Special effects are also amazing. Every little explosion just makes you jump in satisfaction as your enemies ships go down in an explosion so intense it damages other starships.
- Variety of the races and startships are also great. Every race and every ship in these races have strengths and weaknesses.
- There are only three classes of ship, but the variety is enormous.
- The unit building is spot on, you can customize your ship to be really fast or have weapons so powerful you can almost one-shot kill other starships.
- There is a distinct difference between armor and shields.
- You just have to watch the destruction unfold as the some-what decent AI controlling the ships make their moves.\
- There is a slight bit of humor and slightly racist jokes, but they are pointed towards aliens.

Cons:
- The only strategy in this game is planning ahead of time what your units orders are, meaning that you literally have to watch the battles unfold as you are sitting in your chair waiting for something to happen.
- Only three classes of ship to choose from.
- It's from the 2d perspective. If they made it 3d, I would rate it a lot higher.
- Some classes of ship are almost impossible to customize, like the imperial Gun station.
- For some reason shields don't come back up after they are depleted.
- Some of the ships seem too slow, like the cruisers. you would think that something big in space would still be able to travel fast.
- Get's repetitive really fast, but you have to admit some of you had that thought of 'maybe one more battle'.
- The fact that a squadron of fighters takes 3 frigates to take down, no matter how many anti-fighter weapons you have on them.
- Why does armor have such low health? Isn't armor supposed to help absorb damage taken to the hull rather than be blasted away like it was nothing?
- The DLC's only add races and weapons that can only be used by the race you bought them with.
- Maps are literally the same, except for some debuffs in some of them. The only major difference is the background.
- Some ships are only slightly different from other ships. Some of the modules are also only slightly different.

Overall, it is a decent game that isn't really worth the $15 that it is now. Get it on a sale and try it out. If you love space battles and massive explosioins, you would love this game. If you like plot and story to a game, don't get this game.

I rate this a 7/10 (Decent game). If they added a bit more of a difference between the ships and modules, and they had it 3d, and they added twitch decision making the rating would be much higher.

Simple fun if you like watching shps get blown up!