I have had a skeptical
eye on Planetary Annihilation (PA) for some time, but have been hesitant to pay
full price for a beta product of a game I was unsure I would like. While
checking out some live game play on Twitch.tv, a random developer dropped a
steam key into chat and I was lucky enough to activate the product! With
fortune on my side, I feel it is my duty to answer is it worth the full $50
price tag for those not lucky enough to win a copy!
What is Planetary Annihilation?
According to the PA
developer studios, Uber Entertainment, Planetary Annihilation is a:
"RTS (Real Time Strategy) FOR THE NEXT GENERATION. Colonize solar systems, smash entire worlds, and obliterate your foes in epic battles with multiple players and potentially thousands of units. Planetary Annihilation is a next-generation RTS that takes the genre to a planetary scale."
What does this actually
mean? In short it is a space science fiction real time strategy game that
involves controlling large armies on multiple planets. PA lets fight over
precious ground on giant spherical planets revolving around the sun, and moons
revolving around the planets. You can travel between planets and moons fighting
for dominance and victory over each inch of precious ground. This multiple
planet combat is what makes PA unique from other RTS games and brings welcome
variety to what I consider a fairly stale genre. Adding further excitement, PA
lets you build giant, planet moving, Halley engines allowing you to use your
planet or moon as a projectile to eliminate all life on another planet.
Game Modes
PA currently only
consists of one game mode were you battle to take out the other teams
commander. The commander is dual purpose, "super unit" capable of
both constructing buildings and wiping out armies of lesser combat units.
Losing your commander initiates a dramatic huge nuclear explosion leveling a
large area and letting your opponents know of your humiliating defeat.
Combat Strategy
Combat in PA consists of
3 distinct layers consisting of land, air, and orbital. I found it very easy to
forget to adequately defend against one of these layers, especially orbital. I
often found myself lulled into a false sense of security with all my defense
towers, only to get a rude awakening by a swarm of air units coming into my
base wreaking havoc on my base. If you forget to occupy the orbital layer, you
can easily find a satellite parked above your base feeding critical real time
info to your opponent. Even worse, forgetting the orbital layer can lead to
your opponent building a laser satellite and "snipe" your commander
for a quick win. Overall, I loved the three layer system as it required you
gather good intelligence on your opponent to find their weak spot and so you
know where to concentrate your defenses.
Destruction
With a name like
Planetary Annihilation you expect some real destruction, and PA does not
disappoint. Units are incredibly powerful destroying other units and buildings
in just a few hits. This forces you to build massive armies as
your units do not last long once they get into battle, but it also means they
dish that damage right back to the enemy. This makes for a game with large fast
paced engagements with tons of explosions. Included are all kinds of ranged
attacks including long range artillery, cruise style missiles, and of
course nuclear missiles! Annihilation is about the only
word that describes what is left, if anything, of your base once a nuke goes
off.
Planetary Annihilation - Planet Smashing
When nuclear just isn't
big enough for you, you build giant planet moving engines and turn a planet or
moon into a giant projectile to destroy all life on a planetary body of your
choosing. Unfortunately, the game is still early access/unfinished and the
animation for this planetary annihilation rarely plays and sometimes completely
crashes the game. While planet crashing looks cool (when it works and the
animation plays) and sounds like an awesome idea, it often feels like a cheap
or last ditch win. Many times the game turns into a race of who can grab a moon
the fastest and destroy everything, sometimes leaving no winner. Thankfully, PA
gives you the option to create your own universe, set how many engines are
required to move an object, and completely disable moving a planet.
Downsides
Planetary Annihilation
is still in "Gamma" and being developed and is not without its
downsides. The graphics are not impressive and I doubt that will change. That
said the graphics are not bad or completely immersion breaking. The awesomeness
of the huge armies brings frequent performance issues even
for those with great computers. PA has an awesome spectator mode, but this can
quickly become bogged down and as slow as 5 fps. Some animations such as the
planet smash will fail to play and you will get the occasional crash. I have
also seen instances of the AI stuck moving from one planet to another
"ping pong" style back and forth. In one instance a planet smash went
so wrong it just orbited the sun forever (I believe this was fixed in the most recent
patch.
Being early release game
balance and game play both are still lacking. You will frequently find yourself
pelted by ranged missile bases called catapults. Your opponent can set up great
defenses and just spam these catapults and there is no direct counter, but to
rush your army into his heavy defenses. With a little scouting and the help of
radar, your opponent can track your commander through the fog of war and
destroy him from afar with artillery in this manner. There are several
different variations of this all resulting in you helplessly taking fire with
no direct way to counter. Normally I would just wave this off as you getting to
far behind in the game making this your own fault, but on smaller planets this
can happen extremely early in the game and is incredibly frustrating. Overall,
this game provides an abundance of annoying cheap ways to really frustrate your
opponent and secure what I consider a cheap, hollow win.
I do want to make one
thing clear, this game is not finished. Uber Entertainment is still
releasing new features, tweaking stats, and constantly releasing updates. When
the fans complained of the long load times, the developers responded with a
slick system were you load the game completely in lobby. This works beautifully
and took any grip I have with load times away. The last update also fixed
several of the planet smashing glitches/crashes, improved the AI, and
implemented the loading fix previously mentioned. Hopefully the updates
continue to move along, and Uber has plenty of time before their actual
scheduled worldwide launch, "when it is done."
Summary
There is a lot of fun to
be had with Planetary Annihilation and it shows a lot of promise, but it also
comes with its share of frustrations and gimmicks. I still get the feel of
early gameplay that lacks needed polish and balance. In its current state I
cannot recommend paying the full $50. My recommendation, wait for release or
for it to go on sale for $30 or less.
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