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If you look at my review history, I slagged GURPS 3rd Edition Revised heavily, based on the grounds that it didn't deliver on its stated goal. I still hold the same opinion of it on those grounds, but it does actually make a very good fantasy or modern system. I won't be reviewing GURPS Lite Fourth Edition in the same line, first of all because it's Lite, second of all because that's a less practical review.
Part 1: Mechanics Overall, the system isn't bad. It's 3d6, roll under your required score and you succeed. If you think about bell curves, you might think that the system will go wonky with penalties or bonuses depending on what your starting ability is. I certainly did, so I dragged up a table that showed the percentage chances of success for each score, and did some comparisons (this is probably the most useful part of the review, as it will tell you things about GURPS that GURPS Lite definitely doesn't, and the full version most likely won't either).
Someone with a 16 has a 98.1% chance of success. A -4 penalty reduces that to a 74.1% chance of success. Which is a 24% reduction in absolute terms, and a relative 24.5% reduction. Someone with a 13 has a 83.8% chance of success. A -4 penalty reduces that to a 37.5% chance of success. Which is a 46.3% reduction in absolute terms, and a relative 55.3% reduction. Someone with an 8 has a 25.9% chance of success. A -4 penalty reduces that to a 1.9% chance of success. Which is a 24% reduction in absolute terms, and a relative 92.7% reduction.
As you can see, penalties work just fine. The worse you are at something to begin with, the worse you're screwed by unfavorable circumstances. It makes perfect sense.
Doing a simple reversal.
Someone with a 4 has a 1.9% chance of success. A +4 bonus increases that to a 25.9% chance of success. That's a 13.6 fold increase. Someone with a 9 has a 37.5% chance of success. A +4 bonus increases that to an 83.8% chance of success. That's a 2.2 fold increase. Someone with a 12 has a 74.1% chance of success. A +4 bonus increases that to 98.1%. That's a 1.3 fold increase.
Predictably, that scale reverses perfectly. I assumed this would happen anyway, but decided to do the calculations just to make sure. A small bonus is a huge advantage to someone with a very low score, and rather insignificant to someone with a very high score. I'm not sure how I feel about this, on the one hand, it makes a bonus significant enough that someone who effectively has no chance goes to having some chance, so the bonus is actually meaningful. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be realistic, in that the better you are, the more you should be able to take advantage of favourable situations (although this is probably not true in some fields). I don't expect this would ever bother me in a game, it can be reasoned away without much difficulty. If something like this will bother you, then you probably already know you prefer single die systems to bell curve based systems.
Some quibbles I have with the mechanics centre around critical successes and failures. For most people it works fine, but since a 3 and 4 are always critical successes, if your score is a 4, all your successes are critical successes. It also doesn't say what happens if your score is 3, and you should normally fail on a 4 (I assume a 3 or 4 is a success no matter how bad your roll, odds wise it makes the most sense as if only a 3 succeeds, that's a 1 in 216 chance of success - you might as well not roll and assume failure). On the one hand, you could say if you're that bad, and things actually work it was more an act of god (or being touched by the Flying Spaghetti Monster's noodly appendage) that you suceeded so it has to be really good, on the other hand, if you're that bad, you probably shouldn't be having critical successes. This is easy to houserule; that a score of 6 or lower means you can't get a critical success (or maybe only on a 3, and 5 or lower is definitely no critical success). The same problem comes in with a 17 and 18 being automatic critical failures (unless the score is 17+, in which case only 18s are critical failures). It's up to you to rationalize whether someone that good only fails in a really bad fashion, or whether they should be so good they never fail badly.
It would have been nice if they had just thrown in a couple more lines with those issues covered as optional rules based on play style.
Another quibble is the reaction table. This is a table, where rolling higher is better. The thing is, there are reaction bonuses and penalties, but they can easily be applied in reverse and have the table turned on its head to keep everything consistent with checks where rolling low is better than rolling high. The only reason I can think that they didn't do this is that it would have broken a lot of 3rd Edition supplements.
Part 2: Character Creation. This hasn't changed much from 3rd Edition. Attributes have been fixed. Now there isn't a rising cost of abilities preventing you from buying anything over 13 with an average 100 point hero. Instead, to combat the fact that despite rising costs, (it was more worth it in a 100 point character to sink 80 points into DX getting a score of 16, and spend half points on most skills that have DX-2 or DX-1, to have everything sitting around 14/15, instead of paying 2-8 points per skill to get the same level with DX 13) they doubled the cost of IQ and DX, to 20 points per level instead of 10 points per level. While this fixes things for characters in the 100-150 point range, it screws things up in the 25-50 point range (and maybe again in the much higher 200-300 point range, but I never played this range in GURPS as that level of campaign isn't elegantly supported by the mechanics), and also heavily imbalances the game in favour of ST and HT in games where skill isn't as emphasized. Since GURPS is most useful for modern day, near future or fantasy campaigns, where skills are important, and most characters should be in the 100-150 point range, this is a reasonable fix. The way it was done also again probably had something to do with maintaining compatibility with existing 3rd Edition supplements, as the more elegant way to fix things would have been to more evenly distribute skills among the 4 stats, or divorce them from the stats completely.
In terms of advantages, they handle languages seperately now, which I think was another fix for an advantage combination in 3rd edition that let you get a whole ton of really cheap languages at native proficiency.
Since they went to the effort to fix areas where it was broken, I have to point out that it's still easy to break things. The more advantages and disadvantages there are, the easier it is to do. With the Jumper (Time) advantage, which allows you to time travel by force of will, and costs 100 points, you can take dead broke as your wealth level, earning back 25 points, and make your wealth meaningless by going into the future, learning who wins a sporting match, returning, borrowing money from a loan shark and betting on the match, or, if you want to avoid having the GM change the future because somehow you borrowing money and betting changed the course of events, you go into the past and do the same thing from the other end, as retroactively changing game history is a pain in the ass. You can't reasonably justify how only the outcome of the game changed and nothing else did.
You can also get daredevil for 15 points, getting a +1 bonus for doing anything that isn't safe, and impulsive for -10 points and overconfident for -5 points to make you unable to resist just going for an action. Meta gaming wise, impulsive and overconfident are advantages, as they keep the game from getting stale. They can also be meta game disadvantages as they can let one player fuck with careful strategy and argue he was just roleplaying his character. You can also get -10 points for having an odious personal habit of constant bad puns. The really weird thing, is you can get free points for how you're going to roleplay your character anyway. Basically what I see those disadvantages as is "I get free points and the game will be more fun for me". Since the majority of the rules cover combat, you can make yourself an impulsive, overconfident, honest, truthful, bound by a code of honour character for an extra 35 points - all roleplaying characteristics that'll be fun to play. Given that the rules emphasise combat, you can make your character perfectly able to deal with any challenges you come across, so things are fun for you, and give everyone else a major headache. Luke Crane was right when he designed Burning Wheel to have disadvantages cost character points, while he had a balancing mechanic for all disadvantages, disadvantages that pertain to roleplaying shouldn't be giving character points out.
Skills have been nicely fixed, there's only Easy, Average and Hard. No more half character points, Average costs twice as much as Easy and Hard twice as much as Average. I'd still like BESM's campaign utility based cost system better than real world difficulty that's used in GURPS. You can make more varied and interesting characters with the campaign utility cost system.
Part 3: Equipment This covers armour, shields, and weapons. For all the varied skills that they have, including Vac Suit, they only have equipment pertaining to fighting. The equipment list is sparse for modern tech, slightly more fleshed out for medieval. There's nothing for future tech, not even armour stats for a Vac Suit. I'm really disappointed with this section, there's really not much to be interesting. While the Qin demo is only 12 pages, and can only be used for combat, it reveals a lot more about the system than GURPS Lite does trying to give hints at everything else but only supporting combat well.
Part 4: Actions This is hard to review without actually running it through a few games, but a good summary of the actions is that they're good for covering the type of things you'd do in your average D&D game. That's fine, if that's what you want to play, but it really undermines the usefulness of a number of the skills they introduced. The issue with this part of the game, is the same as the Equipment section, while it's more detailed, it still isn't of much use for a good chunk of the skills it presents.
Part 5: Magic There's absolutely nothing on magic.
Why am I including this in my review? The intro blurb says you could play, among other things, a wizard. I'd expect some rules that cover being a wizard to be included if they say that. They also say you could be an asteroid miner. There aren't any rules for asteroid mining either. They say you could be a time traveller - that one's covered. Couldn't they have edited the intro blurb to match what they have in the game, or cherry picked advantages and abilities to match the intro blurb?
Substance wise, it's average. Given that it's a Lite version, and not the full version, I can't fault it much for not being wide in scope, but in a sense it was too wide. It showed a hint of what you could do with the full version, but barring getting supplements, you won't be able to play a long game with it beyond what you could do with a freeform system.
Style wise, it's excellent. While there's nothing really stunning about it, it is pleasing to the eye, the art work is nice, the layout is good, no unnecessary skipping between sections, and I didn't have to strain to read anything. Also, no typos that I could find. Considering all you need is a proofreader, and I'm finding typos in almost every RPG product that's released these days, it's almost worth an extra style point that it doesn't have any. That's more a comment on the depressing quality of RPG products these days than exceptional quality of GURPS Lite, but given what there is to compare to it these days, GURPS Lite does very well. The only reason I'm giving it a 4, despite the fact that it can't impress me further being generic, and therefore inherrently bland, is that I'm reading JAGS Wonderland right now, which is so awesome that giving GURPS Lite a 5 for style would diminish the 5 I'd give to Wonderland. Also, even though it's bland, it was relatively easy to read through. For some reason, although Agon has much more potential zap to it, I'm finding it a chore to read. GURPS Lite is cardboard paste presented in a fashion that makes it appealing enough to eat.
Considering the intended purpose is to get people to buy GURPS, it failed on me. There isn't enough in here to even tempt me to play GURPS even if I was given the core books for free. The only thing I'd be tempted to play it with is WW2, or maybe Vietnam or the Korean War, but that has more to do with GURPS WW2 being discussed a lot on the RPG.net forums than any potential I saw for that in GURPS Lite
