The Kickstarted spiritual successor to the Total Annihilations games, Planetary Annihilation, has, until recently, been coy about showing off the innards of the game in action. In the past two weeks we’ve seen base building and world exploration. Now we’ve got to the good stuff: combat.
The combat doesn’t kick off till the 7.30 mark in the video so do skip ahead if that’s what you’re interested in:
It’s difficult to tell from such early footage what will stay and what will change but, on the positive side of things, it’s looking like tip-tip warfare – all flashes and explosions, big guns bearing down on little robots. Things that we can all get behind (so long as we aren’t suffered from PTSD brought on by the great robot wars of ‘66).
On a more hesitant note, when dealing with armies as large as those suggested by the title Planetary Annihilation, I do worry that it will be difficult to micromanage such a varied force. For instance, in the footage above it did seem that tactics were a matter of select all your units and have them pile into the fight – taking no regard for type of unit and their strengths and weaknesses. However, we’re still looking at pre-alpha footage here. It may well be that Uber Entertainment have some UI mechanics up their sleeves to sort this all out.
I know I wrote about this in the last post on Planetary Annihilation but I’m still taken with the zoom and scale of the game. We’re only looking at a small planet, and war will wage across the surface of multiple balls of space rock in a single game, but the way that the whole globe slopes away to the edge of camera is awesome. I’m really looking forward to seeing more of the game’s features in action.