Planetary Annihilation Preview

Total Annihilation was easily one of my favourite RTS games of the 90s, with the first real use of 3D graphics in the genre and battles that simply felt utterly vast, as patches upped the unit cap to the thousands. This was a game of the brutal stalemate, sending wave after wave of tanks, mechs, planes and boats at your enemy, testing for any sign of weakness as you painstakingly prepared your nuclear arsenal for the decisive blow as soon as you could take down their anti-nuke missile batteries.

Cavedog shut up shop a few years later, after the failure of Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, but we saw a spiritual sequel in the form of 2007’s Supreme Commander, created by many of the original team who found themselves at Gas Powered Games. They brought a whole new scale to the RTS genre, letting you zoom from right next to the smallest unit all the way up to viewing the entire battlefield – which got me hooked on Logitech’s free-spinning mouse wheels. This in addition to three faction, gigantic experimental units and more.

However, Supreme Commander was similarly short lived. A healthy standalone expansion pack was followed by a disappointing sequel in 2010, and GPG found themselves in trouble last year, eventually bought by Wargaming.net, after having been forced to lay off staff and cancel their Kickstarter project. However, while Kickstarter couldn’t save GPG in 2013, it had already breathed life into the fledgling Planetary Annihilation project in 2012, backing the vision of a team of TA and SC veterans at Uber Entertainment.

Right away, it’s clear to see that lineage of gameplay holding over into Planetary Annihilation. Each match sees you starting off with a simple Commander. He’s the linchpin to your entire war effort, building a few basic buildings to get you on your way, before staying well behind the front lines. If he dies, you lose.

However, his early input is vital, getting the first resources trickling and building the bot, vehicle, air and naval factories that then let you access fabricators that can build more advanced buildings. It’s like a tech tree but hidden out of site, as all buildings are there to either provide resources, defend against enemy units or build more units, some of which might well be more advanced fabricators.

It’s simple, fast and effective, just as the resource system is. Instead of paying for stuff from vast stores of gold or stone, it’s streamed in real time. If your stream of metal and energy aren’t quite up to the task, then it just slows work down rather than halting it, though managing your economy early in the game is just as vital as in other games. What it means is that you have the freedom to quickly send a fabricator off on a string of defence construction, send extras to help a big project along or queue up hundreds of units at the factory.

You can very easily pull together a huge, sprawling war factory, churning out unit after unit, assembling army after army to hurl at your enemy. In truth, this will only get you so far, as a well prepared defensive line will send most forces packing, and larger artillery can do a much better job of breaking those down. Air forces and major naval battleships can also play a big role, depending on the terrain. Then there’s always the nukes and anti-nuke missiles, which can make or break a battle in an instant.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing that will stand in the way of this game’s new twist. Instead of playing on squared off maps, each battle actually takes place within a solar system of planets and moons. Flicking that scroll wheel lets me zoom out and see all of the stellar bodies orbiting a central sun, and depending on the size of the planet your troops are on, there can be quite a noticeable curvature to the globe.

After gaining access to more advanced fab units, you can build satellites to soak in vast quantities of solar energy, radar station that scan the entire planet and, of course, vehicles to let you take units to other planetary bodies. These are currently just to be done one at a time, but it lets you start up a new base elsewhere, remove your Commander from a particularly tricky warzone and so forth.

However, the signature move of the game sees you building huge rocket engines on the side of a small moon or asteroid, and then smashing that gigantic rock into an enemy commander’s face. The ensuing explosion of rock and the great chunk that is ripped out of the planet is really quite cool, and it’s such a fun thing to do, giving you the instant kill that even a nuclear strike won’t manage.

Each planet is procedurally generated – while you can dig into a fun solar system editor – and has quite a lovely art style, with the gorgeous little swirls that blend environment transitions a particular highlight. I feel it stays on the right side of being too cute though, and there’s a pleasing utility to the game’s design, which uses each unit’s low polygon count to great effect when chucking hundred of bots into the fray at any one time.

Planetary Annihilation is currently sat in Early Access on Steam, with the beta having opened up to Kickstarter backers a few months ago. However, it is still very early days for the game.

It will eventually have some form of single player campaign, to ease you into the game mechanics, but for now it just drops you in with a basic video tutorial. The AI beat me the first few times as a consequence, but it really only has one plan of action at the moment, which makes it easy to beat after you’ve figured it out – playing against humans is clearly a completely different kettle of fish. Individual unit AI suffers from pathfinding errors, or try to shoot enemies through objects, all of the existing units need to be balanced, and on and on.

Uber have opened up the new year by announcing a bevy of changes and tweaks in an upcoming patch, which will introduce a teleporter building, and they’ve also started streaming their internal playtests, which can be quite amusing to watch.

However, at full £39.99 for Early Access, this is still just for the dedicated fans of the game’s predecessors, and then only if you want to see the game evolve over the course of development. It already has the foundations in place to be an outstanding evolution of this style of RTS, and I personally can’t wait to see how the game comes together over the coming months.