A bit about the game and developers.
Planetary Annihilation has been developed and published by Uber Entertainment. They are quite a new company, but they have a very experienced team. Their only other PC game is Super Monday Night Combat, which is a completely different game from Planetary Annihilation. Planetary Annihilation is a Real Time Strategy with just one simple game. Complete annihilation of your enemy!
About Gameplay.
Planetary Annihilation is a very fast paced RTS. As said before, your only goal in this game is to kill the enemy commander, pretty which is pretty much the same thing like in Supreme Commander series. And once again, just like in Supreme Commander series, you start off with a big commander who starts building up a colony. But this game comes with a fantastic twist! You can get off from the planet on which you are currently, and actually move to different asteroids or planets if there are any. So the map in this game can be quite large, and even though the game is very fast paced few hours can pass before you finish the round. And since you can populate many planets, you can also control them. You can smash one planet into another and take the enemy down by surprise. That happened to me twice already.
Until recently this game was only playable in multi player. But recently Uber Entertainment has added single player. Single player has two game types. Galactic war or Skirmish against AI. In skirmish you battle only one round. You can set up how many planets will there be, resources and players (AI's.). Galactic war is something like a campaign. You start off on one solar system, and your goal is to conquer the entire galaxy. So you jump from one system to another. Some of them have enemies, others do not. Each solar system has an "upgrade" which you use. At first you start off with just three upgrade slots, but as you move through the game you manage to unlock more of them. They aren't exactly upgrades since they actually allow you to build more units. So, without the unlocks you are forced to only use tanks. As you progress (and get lucky!) you unlock air vehicles, orbital vehicles, naval and so on and on. Maybe you even manage to get a NPC commander to help you out! I was lucky enough to get another commander Silva, and he helped me a lot. In fact, I won most of my games thanks to him!
Multiplayer is much different than the singleplayer experience, but that is to be expected. Unlike in single player where bots do their best to get higher tier bots, tanks and aircraft, in multiplayer people use many different strategies and even kill each other within the first two to five minutes of the game! Playing a game with 8 players is very fun but can also get slow and boring once you get rid of most commanders since you can't find the rest of them on so large map. Multiplayer also lets you chose if you want to have shared armies or not. If they are shared you can control each other's units, including the commander. But of course, just like any other game sometimes you encounter bugs. For example in my previous game my teammate's commander couldn't build anything. But that's a minor bug which was fixed as soon as we remade the round.
Graphic and Audio.
Graphic of this game is filled up with pixels and tiny boxes. But that's mainly how this game is supposed to be. This game is voxel based strategy, and I have to tell you that the developers did an amazing job. Even though the game looks quite simple, it's still beautiful. The universe, the planets, the water, trees and vehicles, everything looks very beautiful. The audio in this game is exactly what it should be. Background music. You don't even realize it's there unless you actually focus on it, and it just fits in perfectly as you play. So great job on the music choice!
Pros, cons and final grade.
Pros:
- Large maps.
- Beautiful graphic.
- Fun single player.
- Extremely fun multiplayer.
- A lot of different units.
Cons:
- Hard learning curve. No tutorial.
- Multiplayer games can get long and boring since the map is too big.
- Starting your first Galactic war campaign feels harsh and unfair.
Final grade: 8.5 / 10
Game Trailer
Extra information: If you are a fan of Supreme Commander, or Total Annihilation games, you will love this game. It's large, fast paced and almost no experience is the same. Great game indeed!
You can buy the game over Steam by clicking this link!
Very interesting blog. A lot of blogs I see these days don't really provide anything that attract others, but I'm most definitely interested in this one. Just thought that I would post and let you know.
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