Gratuitous Space Battles Pickup

After writing about the game back in September, I had to try the demo which I just discovered recently. It's pretty fun actually. So fun I decided to get the whole game.

Most of the game consists of building your own starfleets from a number of ship hulls and tons of weapons and other components. You're able to configure your strike fighters and bombers, long-range or AA frigates, support cruisers, or hulking behemoths bent on wiping out your enemies. Once configured, you can issue commands to your ships, and then send them into battle. Once in the fight, you actually have no direct control over the ships. It's really an interesting concept. After the battle, you can view statistics and see what worked and what didn't. Really a statistician's (and nerd's, probably) dream.

Probably the most interesting component of the game is the online level creator. You can build your fleet how you want it, and then issue a Challenge to other players. Through the Online Challenge interface, you can select, download, and play these Challenges and play against other player's fleets. There have been some pretty interesting ones. A rating system for difficulty and enjoyment allows players to rank the levels that they play, and the cream rises to the top, as it were. Cool system for expanding on the missions within the game.

And it's a good thing that there are player-created missions, because unless I'm missing something, there are only a handful of missions within the game. But at least there are the missions you can play with wave after wave of enemies.

That's all beside the point, because the game is really about making huge ships and then making them explode in interesting ways. And this definitely cuts to the chase and gets the job done.