Missed the Mark
Positech Games is a developer who became popular with its Gratuitous Space Combat game. It is also a developer who seems to have no clue what had made this game popular. All its further attempts were a disaster and each game would miss the mark of what made original game such a success. Furthermore, developer would remain closed to criticism and will close himself up with standards bans in the forums. It is a curious case where developer itself has no clue of why its major title was successful and Gratuitous Tank Battles is just another proof of that.
Humour
Writing
Game combat is very primitive. It is scissor, paper, rock type of an affair. You have to use cannons to counter shields, lasers to counter armour, machine guns to counter infantry. It is just too little for such a game. Other TD have damage types for that, usually far more types of damage than this game has. On top of that, turrets can be upgraded and act as various multipliers. One turret slows enemies, another AoE them at short range, another is your basic all arounder, another is long range sniper to be put in far away places.
A standard tower defence game has so much more variety in its gameplay than this game. It tries to do something different, but its core combat is shallow by tower defence standards and thus gameplay feels boring. Even original Gratuitous Space Combat game had more depth in how various such systems would come into play with each other. Various turrets would co-operate with each other to achieve greater levels of depth. Here is none of that.
Allowing enemies to shoot back is an interesting mechanic, but it is completely unbalanced. Here are just few gameplay issues within this game.
This is another mechanic about which developer has no clue about. In Gratuitous Space Combat players liked that mechanic, because you could min/max your ship with certain parts to do certain specific things. You would need to balance several stats in order to be able to do what you wanted. You needed power for shields and weapons. Hey, you are short on power. Add power generation. Now you are short on crew. Add crew cabin. There is no place? Replace laser cannon with torpedo launcher, it will take less manpower and it will fit into my design space. This what made original customisation so good. This game has none of that.
Here however you can’t do that. All parts are just straight up upgrades. System is so primitive that a computer could do that job for you just picking best parts for an unit. There is no complexity, no depth nor you can make any sense of stats. You can pick any unit and there will be no customisation options available. You need something good against armour. There is only one option available. Then everything else is just picking from 5 options of a same item with slightly better stats. Developer is aimlessly trying to stumble on what made original game so good and sadly, he has no clue. It is quite ironic.
You can’t even select upgrades without pouring a lot of time to this game. I had completed defender’s campaign and few offensive missions in the campaign and I’m nowhere near unlocking everything. This game directly scales your power both in campaign and multiplayer with time spent playing this game. If everything I wrote did not discouraged you, how about this. This game is G2W (grind to win) type of game. A player who had grinded more than you has an objective advantage over you in a multiplayer match and in singleplayer by getting better high scores.
In the end it is a soulless attempt at recreating success of an original game. Developer had tried it with this game, it had tried with Gratuitous Space Combat 2. Both of these games were disasters for very same reasons which I had described here. Developer just does not have a clue how to make a good game. Nor it has any understanding what made its original games so good. To put final nail to the coffin, this game is broken and cannot be played without some easy patching. Does developer even bother in trying to patch it?
- What developer tries to clumsily replicate is humour of the original. This game is filled with British WW1 jargon. It is so filled with those quirky lines that it is often hard to read, is hard to understand and often it just says nothing at all. Humour in this seems to be entirely made of that old fashioned jargon and it seems that developer thinks that by merely using it, this would make his game funny. It misses mark completely and game is unbearable to read. It has campaign, but no story. It has writing which says nothing. It has propaganda posters who fail to create a proper feel for an atmosphere. It gives vague WW1/2 propaganda feel, but even at that it does not portray humour or absurdity of it all. It comes as forced. In others, it feels to be written by a lizard people. Just take a look at this: “Humans, come to the factories!”. This is what is written on one of the posters.
Lack of content - Outside of that, there just isn’t enough content or effort here. Where previously individual parts had its own descriptions, in this game it has none. Where each faction had its description, here it does none. Game had rationed development time on everything which makes it enjoyable to play and it feels more like a proof of concept than a full game.
The Difference - What is different in original game? Well, effort. Hard work was poured in writing flavor text for various factions without resulting to cliches or cheap tricks. Writing did not descended into rubbish as it does here. This is the difference! Another major part were item descriptions. In previous game each module had a funny short description. Here there is nothing of the sorts. It takes away all the charm which original had and then developer wonders why it can’t recreate success of an original. The key difference is, Gratuitous Space Combat was a work of love. There was actual effort put into that game. This one is half baked and feels unfinished, rough.
Combat
Game combat is very primitive. It is scissor, paper, rock type of an affair. You have to use cannons to counter shields, lasers to counter armour, machine guns to counter infantry. It is just too little for such a game. Other TD have damage types for that, usually far more types of damage than this game has. On top of that, turrets can be upgraded and act as various multipliers. One turret slows enemies, another AoE them at short range, another is your basic all arounder, another is long range sniper to be put in far away places.
A standard tower defence game has so much more variety in its gameplay than this game. It tries to do something different, but its core combat is shallow by tower defence standards and thus gameplay feels boring. Even original Gratuitous Space Combat game had more depth in how various such systems would come into play with each other. Various turrets would co-operate with each other to achieve greater levels of depth. Here is none of that.
Allowing enemies to shoot back is an interesting mechanic, but it is completely unbalanced. Here are just few gameplay issues within this game.
- Your infantry is almost as expensive as a turret and they die a lot quicker while doing less. They lose effectiveness with their health and can’t be scrapped for a refund during middle of a fight. Infantry in this game does not work, especially on the defence.
- Scrapping mechanic makes this game an annoying micromanagement game. You have to constantly go through all your turrets and scrap them before they are destroyed. After pressing a button, enemy will stop shooting at it and you will recover money in exchange for being unable to build there for a short time. This destroys gameplay as scrapping is necessary for playing this game properly. It also destroys gameplay for an attacker as a defender can just scrap its defences and build hard counters in its place. Whole system of countering your enemy defences with specific units is destroyed by this errant functionality.
- Support buildings are poorly done. Most maps do not have proper locations for them to cover an area. Sometimes it can cover even one building. Maps in general are poorly done as sometimes there will be no place for turrets to be placed and support buildings rarely have a place in this game.
Construct your units
This is another mechanic about which developer has no clue about. In Gratuitous Space Combat players liked that mechanic, because you could min/max your ship with certain parts to do certain specific things. You would need to balance several stats in order to be able to do what you wanted. You needed power for shields and weapons. Hey, you are short on power. Add power generation. Now you are short on crew. Add crew cabin. There is no place? Replace laser cannon with torpedo launcher, it will take less manpower and it will fit into my design space. This what made original customisation so good. This game has none of that.
Here however you can’t do that. All parts are just straight up upgrades. System is so primitive that a computer could do that job for you just picking best parts for an unit. There is no complexity, no depth nor you can make any sense of stats. You can pick any unit and there will be no customisation options available. You need something good against armour. There is only one option available. Then everything else is just picking from 5 options of a same item with slightly better stats. Developer is aimlessly trying to stumble on what made original game so good and sadly, he has no clue. It is quite ironic.
The Grind
You can’t even select upgrades without pouring a lot of time to this game. I had completed defender’s campaign and few offensive missions in the campaign and I’m nowhere near unlocking everything. This game directly scales your power both in campaign and multiplayer with time spent playing this game. If everything I wrote did not discouraged you, how about this. This game is G2W (grind to win) type of game. A player who had grinded more than you has an objective advantage over you in a multiplayer match and in singleplayer by getting better high scores.
Conclusion
In the end it is a soulless attempt at recreating success of an original game. Developer had tried it with this game, it had tried with Gratuitous Space Combat 2. Both of these games were disasters for very same reasons which I had described here. Developer just does not have a clue how to make a good game. Nor it has any understanding what made its original games so good. To put final nail to the coffin, this game is broken and cannot be played without some easy patching. Does developer even bother in trying to patch it?