Something new for space gamers but not approaching for everyone,GSB is still a very descent game.
GSB does not has a great storyline and neither is it an action game. At first look, I thought it was a RTS game. But it is a kind of a strategy game in which you don't just waste your time in collecting those resources, build some fort or something like that and then fight the enemy off. Here, the player actually is just commanding a specific race of his selected race, placing weapons, defence systems and power generators in the ship. Then after you have done this, place the available ships at a position in the battlefield, give an order to your whole fleet, like countering, rescuing, fire at will, fire only when enemy attacks etc, and press the fight button after which, you just have to sit down and watch the battle as the A.I takes control of both yours force and the enemy's force.
In GSB, your main aim is to win battles and take control over the universe. I tried the demo version of the game and in the end thought that it was not a very bad game. In the demo, you have access to 3 single player missions, 9 different ships to chose from, 14 different weapons, 9 different defence systems, 3 engines and 9 other accessories that can be attached on the ships. There are 4 different races to choose from out of which the demo allows you to be the first race. You play a species known as The Federation which is not the complete ruler of galaxy, but is a very good and powerful species with one of the best available ships in the whole game. The demo does not provide any multiplayer. The game is all shown in a 2D platform, but the game still looks good. The ship designs are extremely good. There are those groups of very small ships which are the only ships which can get inside the ship's shield and then attack. Then there are those cruisers which are extremely slooooooooow but are very powerful. You can place so many weapons and defence systems that when you see all its weapons firing, then you will really like the game's graphics. The deadly lasers, cannons and missiles look very good. But the background in the battlefield is a disappointment as it never changes much except the colour and the shape of the clouds. As I said earlier, the game demo has just three missions, so don't except any thing very different in the missions. The one thing that I liked about the mission is that, there is a feature known as 'spatial anomalies' which when comes into play in a mission, reduces your ship's shield at least 50%, and also does not allow those groups of small ships (which I talked about earlier), to take part in the battlefield, due to high level of radiation. This feature is available in the 3rd mission of the game. If this feature was not present in the game, the game would have been very easy. When watching the action in the battlefield, you can see your ship's status such as how the weapons, defence systems, engines are working and what their health status is.
After you win each battle, you earn some honour which will help you to unlock many other ships, weapons, races, etc. These things can be unlocked very easily as I found the missions quite easy. But since the game's difficulty also relies on how you have designed your ship, the game can become tough when you have stupidly designed your ship. By saying designing ship, I mean placing those weapons, engines etc on your ships. Your fellow spaceships also do communicate with each other but you cannot hear it. Those are basically text messages. The game's graphics is good. It is 2D but still is very good. The only glitch in the graphics would be the ship's explosion as it nowhere seems to be an explosion. The background music is good. The A.I is good enough to control both the forces since the game has an automated battle system.
This game is good for those people who want to play something different in this game genre. But people who play hardcore games which involve a lot of player tactics may not like this game. But GSB lives up to its name of giving you something new. The game's USP has to be its varied ship designs and ship components. But the game gets very repetitive and boring after a while because it is quite slow. Also the missions are also very small, and the game does not provide any different objectives in the mission. In the end, I would say that the game is very good and trying this game would not hurt you very much.
-Agastya Gupta.