Indie games hold a place in my heart near and dear; while the quality can sometimes be lackluster compared to titles released by the big guys, this isn't always the case. Recent games like World of Goo and Braid have been critically-acclaimed hits, both because of their quirky uniqueness and because of what they said about the capabilities of small development teams. As more of the gaming audience has grown to embrace digital distribution systems like Steam or Direct2Drive, it's easier now than ever before for a "game studio" comprised of little more than a handful of people to create something compelling and fun.
Throwing itself onto the pile is Gratuitous Space Battles, the latest upcoming release from one-man-show Positech Games. Inspired by the big space fights of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica, GSB is exactly that. You are the Admiral of a fleet of warships, competing against similar fleets operated by enemy AIs. The goal of the game is to craft a dynamic fleet build capable of taking on and destroying increasingly difficult enemy ships in order to progress to the next level. Although a couple of other sites (and indeed the game itself) bills GSB as a sort of tower defense game, I don't see any resemblance between the two whatsoever. Indeed, happening to catch that phrase on a Joystiq article was what attracted me to GSB to begin with, and while I was slightly disappointed to see that it wasn't much of a tower defense game at all, it was still a clever enough concept to capture my attention anyway.
GSB is less about gameplay and more about designing an optimum organization of ships to take on your enemies. The game centers around selecting the right types of ships with the right types of components and weaponry in order to maximize effectiveness against whatever enemy you're facing. Larger ships have more room for addons, but cost more to build as a consequence. Smaller ships have less flexibility, but can stand to be cannon fodder without too much pain. You build the types of ships you want, then go to a staging screen where you organize them on your section of the map, give them general guidelines and orders (such as telling smaller, more agile ships to focus on slower targets, while larger capital-class battleships can do the heavy firing) and essentially just press Go. The game then takes you to a real-time visual representation of the fight, becoming a sort of movie with slightly interactive elements. Beyond the framework of orders you gave your craft in the staging area, you have no direct control over what happens in the fire-fight portion of the game. You can maneuver the camera around and change speeds, but beyond that it's up to the computers to duke it out.
Successfully completing levels gives you currency which you can use to unlock upgrades for your spacecraft; completing a whole string of missions unlocks various other races, each with their own unique appearance and technology, to play as.
With a nod to Spore, GSB lets you pit your builds against other players in a "massively singleplayer" context, letting you send versions of your ships to friends or download theirs to have the computer play against.
It bears mentioning that the game itself is technically not yet available for release; for people who pre-order the game, they're given access to a download of the beta as part of the deal. Personally, other than a few bugs here and there, I found the game itself to be pretty feature-complete and thought it was a completely playable version and well worth the cost of the pre-order, but others might not be as inclined to pull out their wallets without even a demo yet.
Overall I thought the game was fun and a respectable nod to the over-the-top and physics-defying space fights that epitomized Star Wars, Star Trek and similar pieces of the space opera genre. What bugs I did encounter were quickly dealt with by the creator– it's also worth pointing out that so much of the development of this game has been detailed on his personal blog, a nice benefit of dealing with a game made by an indie developer.
I do have some concerns about the replayability factor of this, since I don't know how long I really have the attention span to send my virtual ships to act out a chess game with lasers, but the creator's comments about adding new features and the like have me thinking at the very least it'd be a cute time waster every now and then. On the whole I thought it was a lot of fun to play, and I look forward to receiving the full version when it's finally completed.
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