Planetary Annihilation Critic Reviews

It might not yet feel as complete as the 'official launch' label on its Steam page suggests. But still, you have never seen anything remotely like this. And Uber Entertainment's game loses no opportunity to remind you of that.

Overall this game does what it set out to do, and it does it well, giving both veterans of the series and new players a chance to experience some of the original magic of Total Annihilation, while keeping it fresh and extensive enough to create new battles and new war stories on a galactic scale to tell around the Real-Time Strategy campfire.

Planetary Annihilation has some amazing ideas and an inspired look, but too many issues with the User Interface, the AI and the random generation of the solar systems.

Planetary Annihilation has layers upon layers of features that push the RTS-genre to the next level. The problem is: these revolutionary features are so well hidden that half of the players won’t even find them. There are also some crucial parts missing. The game remains playable, but less of a high quality product as we had hoped.

A ridiculous learning curve hides a fun RTS.

Planetary Annihilation looks and feels underwhelming. Interplanetary combat might seem fun on paper, but gameplay-wise it's an absolute chore. And that's just it, Planetary Annihilation is missing all the FUN which was present on Supreme Commander - a much better successor to Total Annihilation.

True, its best qualities can be obscured in the early going by its unforgiving difficulty and the absence of good tutorials, but even when you're overwhelmed, speedy combat and smart AI reel you in. Give it time, and the fast and furious combat smooth out the rough edges into a compelling and challenging strategy game.

In regard to the real-time strategies there is one sure sign: if you defeat real opponents much easier than the AI - there’s something wrong with this game. If you ask yourself what’s wrong with this gamma-version pretending to be final release, you have to admit – anything bad with exception of engine. We are convinced that after the current gamma version the delta version will follow, then epsilon, zeta, and so on until the omega one. There will never be a final PA release because developers have no idea about the final state of their game.

Planetary Annihilation is a game full of wasted opportunities.

Despite its solid foundation this is not a good game. The techtree is too shallow, strategic finesse, cunning or defensive play is hardly rewarded. Add to that pathfinding problems, performance issues and even crashes and it becomes clear that the potential (or ambitions) were bigger than the final result.

Sadly, this is a game full of wasted opportunities.

Strategy takes a backseat to speed, efficiency and swarming your opponents.

There’s a great game in here, somewhere. Rapidly getting into jaw-droppingly huge wars spanning multiple worlds is brilliant - it really is. And there’s no other RTS that gives players so much destructive power. But the lack of tactical depth and focus on constantly rushing makes Planetary Annihilation tiring.

The whole idea of Planetary Annihilation seemed *too cool* from the very beginning, so it’s no surprise that some of the promises were later forgotten. The developers made the obligatory stuff (after all, you can’t have an RTS about giant combat robots without said robots), but failed to include some of the most basic things that were present in Supreme Commander and even in Total Annihilation.

I know that there's a great, massive RTS beneath all these issues. I've seen glimpses of it when everything works correctly, but at the moment I can't recommend Planetary Annihilation without a warning that it's bound to disappoint and frustrate, even if you do teach yourself to play it.

A frustrating experience.

A cool idea about robot armies battling across an entire solar system breaks apart when the realities of controlling multiple worlds at the same time set in.

The lack of variety is just another bad call in a series of bad calls. With only a single faction, with nothing resembling a tech tree or upgrades, with maps having only a single shape (a sphere inside a sphere) that negates terrain, Planetary Annihilation misses many of the elements that make a good RTS a good RTS. It instead is so in love with its concept, which isn’t very good in the first place, that it never gets around to the vital business of being a good game.