Gratuitous Tank Battles

Gratuitous Tank Battles can be an incredibly fun and rewarding game. Remember the fun it was to build your own custom ships on games like Master of Orion? GTB is a tower defense game that's like that for every single unit or turret. From the smallest cheap gun to the big strongholds, from inexpensive recruit infantry to heavily shielded mechs. Designing the units is simple, but the management of new and older designs can be a little busywork. But this kind of complexity that usually lacks on modern games is very welcomed. The very fact that this games plays as both a traditional tower defense game and an inverted tower defense game is a testimony to its flexibility. It's a robust selection of units with great variation of strategies you can use to beat the enemy. At least for me, the fact that you can design, customize and name every unit in the field adds to the enjoyment and creates a very fun experience when your guys are winning a battle. It's just most interesting when that tank unit you built to be fast and strong barely makes it to the finish line. Building units is not everything, and the battles are intense and complex. Apart from the built-in campaign, you can edit your own scenarios, and upload and download challenges from other users. If you like Tower Defense games or games with customization, this is a very good choice.

Though I really enjoyed Gratuitous Space Battles, I found this one thoroughly inferior. The customization found in GSB simply doesn't exist in GTB. There's no actual modification available, really. You simply unlock new items and those new items are, basically, always better. Whereas in GSB, you had to balance crew-size, energy, weight, cost; in GTB it's basically cost and that's it. NOT recommended.

ENG: One of the best, if not the best tank strategy game on Steam, a simple and addictive game. Referral! :3 FIN: Yksi parhaita, ellei paras tankki strategia peli Steamissa, yksinkertainen ja koukuttava peli. Suositteluni! :3

Ok, maybe i need to have more time to discover how to use my units correctly (4.4hrs when i wrote this) and maybe i suck ass, but i can't help feel that there is just way too much going on to take in. GSB did feel like that at first but i think what kept me playing that is because i was able to distinguish better what worked and what didnt. With GTB however, it feels more like, "spam more than the enemy can handle" kind of game. When i tested out my own custom units as an attacker, i did win, but i couldn't quite make out how i did with what designs were effective and it felt like it was just all about spamming faster than the enemy can place its units down. I did see a couple of units really stand out but that was all i was able to take in and didn't feel as if they made a real impact to the game and was more about having more guns than my enemy to break through their defences. As the defender, different story, after a solid 40mins of deciding what to put in my turrets and so forth i used them in battle, but it seems as though my theory of "the spammier the better" really came to fruitition as my enemy was constiantly fielding units that eventually meant i couldnt keep up with stopping the flow with the supplies i needed. I admit, i may have made classical n00b errors, such as not using the speed settings to help me better make sense of the battle (D'oh), and i noticed how most of my turrets were fitted into Anti-Armor roles. Maybe i just need to go back to the drawing board like i did with GSB, but honestly, after playing a few games of what felt like "the spammier the better", i saw no point and scrapped all of my turret designs. You see with Space Battles i was able to figure out roughly where i went wrong if i lost a battle. Sometimes it was a design that ended up being obsolete with enemy designs or not being able to fill the role i intend it to. But with Tank Battles it didn't feel like that at all. It felt more like all of my units were at fault and the unit stats at the end did nothing to help me at all. I just couldn't make sense of all the information being given to me. Though as i said at the beginning, i probably suck and need to put more time into this game for its goodness to really shine, but it felt like a real dissapointment from its Space counterpart, and besides, i have never been one for Tower Defence style games anyway as i always find the genre having little strategy and mainly focusing on who spams best. Tank Battles seems to be the same story then as always for me, just with customisation of units being a nice feature to it all. 5/10. A game that looked promising along with the customisation features but maybe that is due to my love of its space daddy counterpart. Overall, i am dissapointed, hope i can come back to this and it convinces me to change my mind. If you love TD games, this may be for you but may not be exactly your cup of tea, and all the customisation and info that this game bombards you with may put you off in the end, aside from that, i advise you save your £6.99 (£11.98 with the DLC included) for a rainy day and look elswere. And as for me, i am off to play GSB in order to cheer myself up by blowing alien ships up for no apparent reason, at least i can make sense out of all the chaos...oh well... *readies plasma cannons* toodles.

This game is good. It's really good. If you love making customized units that you can later on watch in combat, then this is a game for you. As for gameplay, I can describe this one as a combination of Close Combat series (the top down camera style reminded me of those games) and Anomaly Warzone series. The thing that I loved the most is that you can create your own units based on a variety of hulls, and once your'e done with the campaign maps, you can go and play any map that other players have created. You can even create your own maps and upload them so that everyone can give them a try. I am not saying this game is a triple A quality title, but it's a really neat and well presented indie product that can give you many hours of fun, and it definitely earned a rating of at least 75%. When you look at some mindless and pointless games that have been awarded with 90+ by the Steam community (Goat Simulator being one of those) you can only begin to question how ignorant the community is nowadays, but trust the gaming veterans like me and get this game, you won't regret it. IF you're still indecisive, wait for a discount.

Typical Tower defense game. Nothing special. NOTHING AT ALL like gratuitous space battles. Don't be fooled.

[h1]Missed the Mark[/h1] 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. [h1]Humour[/h1] [list] [b][i]Writing[/i][/b] [*]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. [b][i]Lack of content[/i][/b] [*]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. [b][i]The Difference[/i][/b] [*]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. [/list] [h1]Combat[/h1] 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. [olist] [*]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. [/olist] [h1]Construct your units[/h1] 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. [h1]The Grind[/h1] 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. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] 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?

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The pseudo-sequel to GSB patches up a lot of things that its predecessor didn't do as well. You now have to equip something in every slot of your models, you can customize their appearance much more, the battles are asymmetric and you have to control things instead of passively watching, and the different maps provide a lot more variety than the void of space. I would recommend it more highly except that the battles take so darn long. I'm sitting there for 15, 20 minutes or more, either fending off waves of enemies or throwing my troops into the grinder, and there's still half the mission to go. It feels more slog than fun, sometimes. It just… lacks something, some ineffable quality that other TD games have. Also, the unlock system was partially better in the previous one. I'm many games in, and most of the way done with the campaign, but there are still bunches of things to be unlocked. The other one gave you points for every victory and you could just buy the things you wanted in the store (often several for a good-scoring mission), but this one gives you one scripted thing and a choice between 2 other equips after each fight. This is good in that the scripted ones ensure you get the important stuff first, but bad in that it takes a [i]lot[/i] of missions to unlock everything. Jury's still out on the balance, but it's replaced its predecessor's "here are 5 equips that vary slightly from each other" for any given category with "here's a small, medium, and large thing - what'll it be?". That, combined with the fact that attacker and defender use almost the same gear, means that I'm skeptical of the potential variety. Will have to play it more. Ed. So, after coming back to it for a while, I don't think my views have changed. It still feels like your decisions are mostly dictated by the map and your budget, not your overall battle plan. There's room for creativity in unit design and deployment mixes, but the fact that you can only put guys/turrets/support structures in pre-defined places really limits how you can play the level. For the attacker, it's even worse, since you have to send your troops down specific routes, and they always seem to get snarled up by traffic jams. The game lacks any realism in having wrecked tanks block your way, but injured ones at the front of the line will still slow you down. The attacker is supposed to have the advantage at the start, since they get more cash more quickly, and the defender later, since they never run out of income and keep all their non-destroyed defenses on the board. However, it really feels in most maps like the defender has an overwhelming advantage from the get-go. With the right placement of troops and turrets, they can get such a volume of fire in one spot that your line of vehicles, advancing single-file, will get picked off one at a time before they have a chance to do much damage. And if they have a repair yard nearby, what little damage you do inflict will be fixed in no time. Perhaps I just haven't hit on the right combination yet, but this seems somewhat shallow to me, as the first one did. It's still not a bad game, and worth exploring for a while if you enjoy this type of thing. There's a lot of replay value to be found in the maps and the asynch multiplayer skirmishes.

I haven't played it for long since when I tried to customize a unit you can only really change the colours, and the models only come in different gun presets, if you are expecting anything like the spaceship version but just TD styled, you are greatly mistaken, the only customization here are stats and colours.