I’m staring at this review and wondering why I played this game in the first place. I like space games, believe me I do! But Gratuitous Space Battles isn’t my cup of tea. I expected something that would face off huge space battles but not what turned out to be a tinkers game. I can say it’s an unusual type of game that seems to have its own genre and followers.

The premise of Gratuitous Space Battles, as if you couldn’t guess, are fantastic space battles between your fleet and one generated by the computer. This is a strategic management simulation developed by Positech Games. It’s full of all kinds of beam weapons, missiles, shields and other assorted goodies. Think explosive action as missiles rip into the soft underbelly of your opponent. Laser beams picking off enemy fighters and point defense weapons staving off those offensive missiles striving to get through your shields.

The 2-D graphics are fantastic as you see the results of individual explosions on your ships and the opponent’s ships. You’ll see smoke trails from missiles streaking in. Laser beams trying to find a weak spot through shields and fighters buzzing in and out of all the action. The colors are great all around. Martial type music invades throughout the game — whether designing new ships or getting into the heavy fighting between opposing fleets.

The main action is designing new ships that are then used against the computer-generated ships or against human opponents in multiplayer online combat. You start with some hulls, fighter, frigate and cruiser. Then you add various modules, such as crew quarters, power generators, armor, weapons components and engines among other things. Each module has a cost, such as crew needed, power required, monetary costs and different factors as a basic to more advanced design. You decide what works best for you and hope you can defeat the enemy after you set up for the big fight scene. Commands are given as to what priorities you want against what type of ship. Once you have tweaked everything, then let the fight begin. This is where you sit back and see what happens. You can’t directly affect the outcome; you just hope your design was better than what you’re facing.

Each ship has its own commander and will follow the set of commands you preset, but that is all within the parameters of the design. There is still the “what if” question: Are my designs good enough to withstand the enemy onslaught? There is also the human-to-human confrontations that the multiplayer option is incorporated into the game if you so desire.

My take on all of this is definitely mixed. I liked the thought of designing my ships for awhile, but that began to lose its allure. You can only put so many modules in so many ships before it becomes old hat. This is where the tinkering and tweaking comes in for those that are looking to become arm chair commanders. Another annoying thing was that you had no idea what the other fleet was except for outlines suggesting what type of ship would be fighting you. The music though good was redundant. After about an hour of playing Gratuitous Space Battles, I lost interest. I mean, how many times can you sit there watching either your fleet getting an ass whipping or the opposing side taking a beating. This is a game that only a tinker-type player would love to have. If by all means you are one of those, then this game will be right up your alley. As for myself, I’ll pull out one of my 4K space games and have at it, thank you.