Planetary Annihilation

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Planetary Annihilation: Best RTS ever, but not easy to play as a Hunter to get up in ranking games. Just learn to be fast to make a big army and every time you play you ll love PA more and more. PA must be Olimpic Sport.

Really like many things about this game. It IS the true successor of many RTS games. However, it has one fundamental problems and this manifests in pretty much a one strategy solution in most starter situations which detracts from the whole experience. Xerg Xerg Xerg. If your on a planet with one or two others at the start. Build bot factores and xerg. If the opposition do not, the fastest xerg wins. This is disappointing for me as I hoped for a broader tool kit. The problem is that defence is pretty mute at the moment until later in the tech development so early on. You can simply xerg to win which often makes you think your literally playing the same game you already played before, but with some new sprites. The multi planet element is great, the range of weapons is nice yet, all of this is not balanced well. Offensive and defensive has not been balanced at all for the early game and the whole Xerg thing should have been avoided to make it a lot more fun to play, particularly in multiplayer as I don't like following the same formula for a win. I would prefer a bit more variety. There are exceptions depending on the setup but the basic issues with defence being nominal is a problem even now (October 2014)

Well there's been something of an opinion war here, and many of the negative reviews are too negative because of a non-game issue that I won't go into. There are some overly positive reviews as well to counter this, so I will try to write a useful review. First, it must be said: this game is a blast - engaging, intense, and surprisingly well balanced. Fast paced tactics and strategy on a huge scale. But it's received a lot of legit positive criticism, so here's why I didn't rate it 10/10: First of all, and most detrimental to the game: it has performance issues. Lategame tank armies can slow the game to a crawl. Annihilating a planet can freeze the game for a long time and sometimes even crash it. The client occasionally crashes for no discernible reason (though you can reconnect), and there are other bugs, some of which are at least temporarily game breaking. Internet access is required to play, even singleplayer, though I've heard this will change in the 1.0 release. The game is in early access, so these problems are understandable, but they are still there. Secondly, there are balance problems. While most units have their uses and should be used to play optimally, things like tier two bombers are blatantly overpowered in the hands of a skilled micro player (they deliberately out-range all anti-air) and artillery units are a little strong as well. Bots, which are an entire tree of units, are considered very weak because they cannot defeat any of the other trees on their own. Balance is currently in progress, but there have been some worrying balance decisions by the team at Uber. This is the time to experiment with that, though, if there ever is one. Lategame can get rather standoffish. This can make for some slow games, especially in large free-for-alls, very especially coupled with the poor lategame performance, which is not only visual but also server-side. (So it slows down the game's actual mechanics.) There also is not much variety in interplanetary combat. It is also very easy early on in the game to get into a situation where winning is nearly impossible, but the game will still drag on for a long time - possibly without the player even knowing that winning is nearly impossible. This really punishes new players. Finally, system creator is rather limited. While you can set the general idea, you cannot sculpt your own terrain. This is not really a requirement, as that would be asking a lot, but just don't expect that and be disappointed. All that said, this game has already been a worthwhile purchase. Hopefully my rating will improve as the game becomes more finished.

In its current state : This game is very bare-bones with tons of potential. If that potential is being realized it may well be one of the biggest RTS games for years to come. If not - it will just sink into oblivion. in a more detailed review visuals: the style is clean, the units are recognizable. the design is somewhat boring though. detail and animation seems to be FAR below Supreme Commander standards - and much closer to the old Total Annihilation - which is kind of a shame considering TA is pretty old. UI: I do disagree with the UI style because it reminds me too much on a cheap mobile phone UI. There is no finesse about it. It is in one word "boring". it is however functional enough and does not hinder gameplay. Sound: Kind of dreadful. The sound effects have no "weight". If the game is meant to be similar ( in size ) to Supreme Commander - those units, even the smallest ones, are meant to be HUGE ( from a humans point of view ). Yet the sound of firing and impacts does not really convince. gameplay: currently it is simplistic - It might change tremendously with different factions and more terrain variety though. So i can conclude that this game "can" be great - if more efford is put into it - but in its current state it is well below average and quite a disappointment.

This game is a mess. Basic storyline (only sparse text at some corner of the screen, no picture, audio or video), only 4 perks at the same time (that could be maxed out without even fight a single battle), basic tech tree (again, could be maxed out easily), most units and building are useless (specially walls), warning messages are hit-or-miss (no logs), this game is fast (a round could lasts minutes) so we should forget about strategy and more to build fast and powerful units. Also, the game is highly unbalanced.