Gratuitous Space Battles
Skip · Strategy · 2009
The verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $14.99.
- Length
- 2.8h
- Value
- $5.35/hr
- Reviews
- 70% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 1 GB of memory, 3D Card with 128MB video memory, 297 MB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The first ever auto-battler game, from way back in 2009Who needs backstory? Who needs resource-gathering? Diplomacy is so last year. Gratuitous Space Battles cuts right to the chase of sci-fi strategy games, and deals with large, completely unjustified space battles between huge opposing space fleets.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $1.49. That was November 2022. It has been discounted 61 times in the 14 years tracked here, typically at 66 percent off, with about 11 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 11 weeks.
It is pricier than 84 percent of its genre, and less well reviewed than 70 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Reassembly ($14.99, scores 59) beats it on value, while it beats Spacebase DF-9 ($9.99, scores 0).
2.8 hours to finish it, 15 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 5.2 times the campaign.
Players
1 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Sad to give this a negitive... i loved this game. I randomly wanted to launch it up today and play a campaign but the online servers are dead and can't validate CD Key so can't play the Campaign... it's barely half a game without it. I can understand a company not being expected to keep servers running forever and for a nearly 20 year old game, but they should of at least made it fully playable without needing those...
STEAM SHOULD NOT BE SELLING SOFTWARE WHICH HAS BEEN ABANDONED AND NO LONGER WORKS! The 'campaign' section of this game requires you to login online. Steam knows that the online servers have been TAKEN DOWN, but they don't tell anyone! They are taking money under FALSE PRETENCES, which is a criminal offence in the UK.
I'll start off by saying I really enjoyed this when I first played it, but now I've come back to it, I can't register my key (it says key invalid). There's no contact for support, and if you look at the forums, it is full of people with the same issue. Not recommended until this issue is fixed
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Gratuitous Space Battles scores 26/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/41800/gratuitous-space-battlesThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 4, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.