spiralofhope

Entertainment > Games >

https://store.steampowered.com/app/344840/
http://www.gratuitousspacebattles2.com/

A tower defence game with space ships.

I didn’t play a whole lot of this, because the novelty wore off with the first one. However, it looks like this is more of the same: Highly customizable and extremely fun, but with poor replayability. Worth a bit of coin if you’re a fan of tower defence games.

I was able to utterly blow away the first two practice missions. It does look like it gets a lot harder. I think maybe this isn’t really for me right now or perhaps isn’t my thing any more. I think I would like this game a moderate amount if I spent more time with it.

Playing a few hours in, the UI is really annoying. That alone makes this game extraordinarily hard. I hate having to fight the game itself to figure all my shit out. I’m giving this a pass.

Like its predecessor, bonus points for the author throwing away all sense of storyline. Fuck all that shit, I just want gameplay. I’m not joking.

• Preceded by Gratuitous Space Battles

• Support was dropped for this game. See Indie game developers move on. Or they fail.

• I’m immediately wowed by the music.
• I hate fullscreen mode, tabbing sucks hard.
• The music restarts at the dumbest times. That’s jarring.

• when editing

  • Saving should automatically suggest a name, like -copy1 etc.
  • It would be nice if saving/loading gave dates/times.

• When deploying

  • It would be nice if I could know more about my ships as I was deploying them. It seems confusing to me.
  • Cannot undo a ship change.
  • I cannot know what type of ship class I’m up against.
  • “New ship” enters design mode. It should just say “Design”.
  • I was expecting the sub-deployment feature to let me.. deploy that set of ships that I saved. So I can easily drop a group of ships into a formation. Do I misunderstand this feature? What does it do?
• When loading, cannot double-click an item to load it.
• If my hull is 100%, why am I on fire?
• I don’t know.. there seems to be a lot of complexity there.. and things could be made more straightforward.
• I wish I could zoom out more.

• I wish it started the map right away instead of making me press any key.

  • I guess this is okay, since it may take some time for the caching to take place.

• The cursor is wonky in many places.

  • When typing the ship’s name makes it hard to know where the cursor actually is. There’s a space before it.
  • Also cannot control-a, or shift-home.
  • ‘del’ does nothing.
  • Cannot press enter.

• One of my deployments bugged out.. everything seems to be in formation with some odd thing off to the top-left. Starting the fight crashes.

  • This is reproducible. I saved this data. It is the third planet of the single-off fighting, named ‘1 – bugged’.
  • I thought this was related to formations and using the sub-deployment feature, but I can reproduce it.
• The damned voice gets annoying.
• Can’t click on ships mid-battle to see what’s up. I have to click the left mess of ships.

• With lots of shit in the way, pressing escape mid-battle will prompt to exit the fight.. not close the windows. Sigh.

I’m getting too frustrated at the UI to continue..