More dead than alive: review of Planetary Annihilation: Titans. Short-term strategy “Planetary Annihilation” Interface and game menu

Planetary Annihilation: TITANS is a strategy game developed by Planetary Annihilation Inc for the PC platform. The environment in the game belongs to the fantasy style, and the following features can be distinguished: strategy, real-time strategy, space, for several players, robots, science fiction, base building, war, cooperative, construction and others. You will have access to these game modes as "single player", "multi-player" and "co-op".

Planetary Annihilation: TITANS is distributed worldwide on a one-time purchase basis by publisher Planetary Annihilation Inc. On this moment The game stage is launched, and its release date is 08/18/2015. Planetary Annihilation: TITANS cannot be downloaded for free, including via torrent, since the game is distributed according to a one-time purchase model. The game supports Russian language.

MMO13 has not yet rated Planetary Annihilation: TITANS. The game is distributed on the Steam store, whose users rate this game with their reviews at 7.9 points out of 10.

The official description of the game reads:

"Manage huge armies and start a war among entire solar systems. Defeat enemy forces with crushing TITANS and destroy entire planets with high-tech super weapons!"

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When launching your advertising campaign, Uber Entertainment did not mince words. " will change your understanding of real-time strategy games!“- they wrote on their website. Of course, in the end the view didn’t change much. The main thing that she achieved was that she turned our brains inside out. In a good way.

Planet + planet = happiness

The title perfectly conveys the essence of the game: you still have to destroy planets. Explode, push against each other or simply capture. As in most RTS games, you must build a gigantic military force and trample your opponent as quickly as possible - only instead of “flat” maps, you are given entire solar systems to be torn to pieces. And at first it’s truly amazing.

You have to get used to the voluminous world - the battlefield, which often includes several celestial bodies at once, is very difficult to keep track of. Danger can come from anywhere, even from the other side of the planet, even directly from space. Nothing prevents you from arranging a surprise for your opponents and planning a grandiose invasion from nowhere - bringing troops through a network of teleports built on the sly, for example.

However, at first we will have to wait a bit with grandiose macro-planning and focus on the arms race. It all starts on the ground, with one single commander. He can build buildings, repair and even fight a little, but once he dies, the battle is lost. So the leader must be protected, and there is no way to do without a base and hordes of auxiliary combat units.

The systems where fights occur are randomly generated. You can try to arrange everything in your own way, but the possibilities are very limited: they only offer to select the type of planets and move a couple of sliders.

At any moment of the battle, you can watch its recording (the battle will continue in the background). There is little practical benefit from this yet - except perhaps trying to understand what just hit you.

At the same time, the scale is growing without stopping: we start with small robots and tanks, and after some time we may well be able to launch our first satellite into orbit. Despite the minimalist picture, this galactic war looks impressive and very fresh. Especially when truly advanced technologies become available - like those that make it possible to collide two planets at once, destroying all life on them.

Conquest of space is perhaps the most enjoyable part of the game; with access to space, the nature of military operations changes dramatically. The only pity is that often everything ends much faster than major showdowns unfold. For some this may be a problem.

Need for Speed

It is important not to hesitate. We managed to gather enough forces to repel the first attack of the enemy - good. We missed a moment - that’s it. The battles here start very quickly and end quickly. So much so that in single player The developers didn't even provide a save button. There's simply no need for it.

Similarly (in which direction the game often makes a nod), it shifts the emphasis from microcontrol of units to macro-level planning. Almost all skirmishes turn into a showdown where those in greater numbers win, but since the maps include entire planets and the space between them, and battles can easily take place on several fronts, the hardest and most important thing is to keep track of everyone.

This requires serious skill. The developers have provided a convenient system of hot keys and even a small auxiliary window in which you can display an image from any other place on the map, but it is still very difficult to keep track of what is happening at first.

Explosions like these are one of the main reasons to love this game no matter what.

Here you can’t (and don’t need to) think long about the layout of the base. There is often no point in fortifications either - the enemy can still come from anywhere, and if there is a threat from space, the walls will not save you. And while you are busy with the turrets, the enemy will have time to grow so large that he can easily destroy them. It is much more effective to spawn vehicles as quickly as possible in order to simply overwhelm the enemy with numbers at an early stage. When you realize this, the game turns into high-speed reproduction, where the main skill is the ability to maintain a conveyor that does not stop for a second.

But this is not bad, such local specifics. does not allow you to get bored - there is no time for boredom - and forces you to make decisions with lightning speed. What to build now? How much effort should be devoted to defense and how much to attack? When seconds count, the tension is serious.

Ten friends for one star

In its current state, it definitely gravitates towards multiplayer. Instead of a full-fledged campaign, there is a storyless Galactic War mode, in which we move from system to system, from time to time bumping into opponents and playing a game with the AI.

However, artificial intelligence is quite capable of competing here. Competing with him in terms of development speed is often problematic: you’ve just built a couple of factories and a turret, and the enemy is already sending out an entire air fleet. But at times it surprises, starting to, say, develop taking into account your chosen strategy. They began to put pressure on the air force - the enemy would immediately respond by starting a race in the same direction.

True, sometimes the AI ​​still malfunctions, either becoming too active and strong, or, on the contrary, falling into some kind of long-term trance. One day we discovered that a lone... commander was hanging around our fortifications. The bot just took it and brought him to visit us.

Unfortunately, the planet generator isn't very inventive. Beautiful and interesting landscapes are rare here.

However, the real battles, as expected, take place between live players. And the multiplayer turned out to be decent. In the game itself there are bugs and shortcomings every now and then, but the network component works stably. When a dozen people fight for influence in an entire solar system, sometimes amazing things happen: hundreds of pieces of equipment converge on planets and beyond, cunning invasion plans are realized, and the demands on the speed of thinking increase to the limit. Well, if you're lucky, at some point you can even witness the destruction of some celestial body. The budget visual part, however, does not convey the full epic nature of the situation, but the spectacle still turns out to be fascinating.

* * *

And still the same Supreme Commander was, albeit “flat,” but a much deeper and more thoughtful strategy. There was more content, more subtleties and far fewer bugs. still too raw, the developers preferred not to drag out the Early Access internship to the end and launched as soon as they got hold of the necessary minimum. The game is evolving and will continue to evolve for a long time, but it seems that it can afford to do so. Uber has already gathered a dense community around them that won’t let them go so easily.

But she couldn’t cope with this task. Many shortcomings quickly took their toll and the game was happily forgotten. However, the developers from UberEntertainment decided not to give up what they started by releasing an add-on calledTitans.

Planetary Annihilation is a strategy about global galactic battles between conventional factions that are no different from each other. There is no backstory in the game, so you can invent some civil war or something similar if necessary. Of course, the absence of significant differences between the factions eliminates any possibility of imbalance. Only your strategic talents decide.

Oddly enough, Planetary Annihilation has virtually no tactics as such. This is a game about who can quickly establish a strong economy based on two resources: metal and energy. The rest doesn't make any sense here. Know yourself, release the equipment from the factories and throw it into battle. The only thing you need to think about is combining types of troops. There will be no anti-aircraft equipment - your squad will quickly be destroyed by aircraft. If there is no fleet or amphibians, they will be destroyed from the sea. Not that this was a test of your tactical mind, but at least it was something.

The diversity of soldiers is also mostly illusory. For example, among ground equipment you can choose bots or classic tanks, but the differences between them are largely visual. There is conventional artillery, light and heavy troops - all of this will then be mixed together and turn into ordinary meat. However, the variety of troops somewhat brightens up the monotonous battles.

The Titans expansion brings virtually nothing new to the game. This is a revision, fixing old errors and making a few cosmetic changes. Ideally. Unfortunately, the old errors were far from completely corrected, and several new ones were added to them.

One gets the feeling that inUberEntertainment thought that bigger was necessarily better. EventuallyTitans brought to the game several new units of equipment, a couple of new cards and super-units - titans.

If with conventional technology everything is immediately clear, then it’s worth looking at the titans in a little more detail. Titans are ubersoldiers designed to change the course of battle and intimidate the enemy with their sheer size. They are really strong, but in reality they are just huge tanks. Yes, the size and power are impressive. Some titans can even destroy planets or teleport half of your army directly to the enemy base. But, in the end, any fight comes down mainly to fights between squads of tanks and the same tanks.

AI has become, albeit a little, better. Now he does less stupid things and sometimes attacks from where you don't expect. True, you need to immediately set the difficulty to high, otherwise you simply will not meet any serious resistance.

The multi-level battlefields also look good. You have one or more planets, and battles take place simultaneously on the ground, in the air and in space. Despite the relatively small size of these planets, everything looks large-scale.

Titans has three game modes: single battles against the computer, multiplayer and the Galactic War campaign. With the first ones, everything is simple and clear: choose a card and go ahead, grind the enemy into powder. In the campaign, the player will face a galactic system formed randomly, with opponents scattered at its different ends. The victory conditions are trivial - capture everyone. For occupying the next planet, you will be given three different technologies to choose from. This can be either a whole branch of units or regular bonuses for resource extraction. But the number of places for active technologies is limited, so you will have to constantly choose. However, given that you will need all types of troops, other technologies become practically useless. There simply won't be room for them.

It is worth noting that some players also noted the instability of the game. She often simply falls or breaks the connection in a battle with a living opponent. There are often problems with FPS drops. While the views are not striking, the game requires a fairly powerful system for comfortable play.

In a word, before us is a man who decided to get out from under the wing of Chris Taylor. Yes, yes, the same “Great and Terrible” Chris Taylor, who created the real-time strategies already mentioned above, and during the breaks he fooled around with his .

Taking into account that both of Taylor's strategic projects, frankly speaking, did not pluck stars from the sky, it is not surprising that his programmer decided to try his hand at game design himself. Why not, Mavor probably thought, because there is nothing complicated in the RTS genre. You just need a bigger map, more diverse units and epic battles of “hundreds of thousands of troops against the same horde.” Well, really, isn’t this the quintessence of the genre?

However, let's not be too harsh on Mavor. Firstly, this is his first experience in game design - and, looking ahead, we admit that the first pancake here turned out to be far from lumpy. Secondly, unlike the boring crafts of Chris Taylor, the brainchild Uber Entertainment it turned out to be much more interesting. As usual, everything was based on one interesting idea...

Mavor did his job

One day, humanity went beyond the boundaries of the solar system, conquered the entire galaxy, created a great power, and then died safely, having overworked itself in the crucible of a monstrous war. The war was so monstrous that the separated people, for fun, threw entire planets at each other, fired at enemy bases from giant orbital lasers, frying billions of people to a crisp, and when they got tired of this disgrace, they simply threw the planets they didn’t like straight into the local star. As you understand, the fun ended one day, and the galaxy was left with only peacefully dozing combat robots as a souvenir of upright talking monkeys. One day the robots woke up, and, following the program laid down in them (kill all people, glory to the robots!), they continued the fun.

Can't destroy an enemy base with your troops? And don't, drop the moon on your opponent! In general, you can safely forget about the plot; it’s actually not in the game. Instead, we'll be treated to a boring Galactic War mode where we'll wander around star map and engage in epic battles with the enemy with the sole goal of killing everyone and being left alone. Here we could safely put a stake in the game, and, finally, giving out something witty, end the review, if not for one “BUT”. “BUT” you have seen it all if you have watched at least one trailer - at a certain stage the robots under our control go into space and begin to build various orbital lasers, warships and other scrap metal. Gradually, we get the opportunity to attach a couple of dozen engines to the local moon, and even drop it on an enemy planet, laughing maniacally in front of the screen. Aesthetes can throw a planet directly into a local star - to complete the immersion in the atmosphere, they should press their little finger to the corner of their mouth and start giggling ominously in the spirit of Doctor Evil. Finally, the most persistent robot builders will be able to build a huge space station and stupidly demolish a rebellious planet of ridiculous size with a laser gun - don’t forget about the insane laughter of an evil genius appropriate to the moment and stock up on Corvalol.

And it is precisely this idea, perfectly integrated into the game, that completely saves the situation, because you will be interested much longer than when playing the same Supreme Commander. First, build small satellites and primitive laser weapons in orbit. Then - larger guns and the first planetary engines, capable of moving a large asteroid or a small moon. Aesthetes can build a couple of dozen orbital transports and transport an invading army through orbit directly to the enemy’s rear, bypassing all defensive structures. Well, the most violent ones will simply destroy planets. Although, it is quite possible that we will not finish the game until this moment. Artificial intelligence Planetary Annihilation It only causes melancholy. He is extremely weak and practically incapable of surprising. Apparently, a dozen general tactical schemes are simply built into the electronic brains, which the computer implements in each game. The “air attack” scheme, for example, forces the enemy to concentrate exclusively on combat aircraft and besiege your base with all available types of flying equipment. And if for one reason or another you cannot approach his base on the ground, shoot the enemy from orbit with combat lasers. Other times, a "space" scheme is launched and the enemy will rely only on orbital weapons. In short, once you learn these patterns and learn to recognize them, the game is over for you.

Or we'll destroy the planet!

The rest is still the same before us Total Annihilation or, if you like, Supreme Commander. At the very beginning we have a single robot commander, whose destruction automatically ends the battle. This robot builds simple buildings, from which more advanced robot builders emerge, capable of erecting second-level buildings, where you can create even more advanced builders... Resources include metal mined in endless ore veins and energy extracted from power plants. Yes, yes, no one even bothered with the mechanics of the game, it was copied from the two aforementioned strategies. However, keep in mind that battles are not fought on a flat map, but at least on one planet. What is a planet? That's right, it's a ball, so they can attack you from any direction. In addition, we must not forget about outer space - from there we can also land space marines directly on our heads. Or launch combat lasers into orbit, a couple of which will easily, cheerfully and cheerfully level our base to the ground. And if there are several planets on the map, you have to monitor everything at once.

The game's artificial intelligence is capable of acting according to about ten patterns that you quickly learn. However, Uber Entertainment created Planetary Annihilation for online battles. Oddly enough, everything is even more boring there. Human players don’t bother much with all these high matters and, out of old habit, love quick games, staging a blitzkrieg. Simply put, in 7 cases out of 10, the most delicious thing in the game - planetary destruction - remains simply unclaimed. But in network modes at the most large maps It's quite fun to knead each other, uniting in alliances. There are three players on one side, three on the other, and all on different planets. This is where the fun begins. Especially if you don’t slow down and quickly colonize your entire planet, lining it with anti-space defense systems so that not a single infection can secretly land troops on you. But such parties are the exception rather than the rule.

Picture Planetary Annihilation does not cause delight - the developers, obviously, deliberately made the graphics half cartoonish, so as not to overload computers, which are already forced to often process epic batches. Sounds and music do not hurt the ear, which means they are ideal. However, the game's soundtrack is full of epic compositions that complement the atmosphere of the galactic war well. However, the game sorely lacks a sane campaign, and the entire game process comes down to blunt throwing of meat. Yes, we have a lot of types of troops, but most often the winner is the one who quickly captures the most ore veins and builds the thickest grouping of troops. There are simply no tactics in the game as such.

If to development Planetary Annihilation at least one person with imagination got involved - best of all, one of the deceased Westwood- and insisted on good story campaign, for example, depicting a bloody war between NATO and the USSR (yes, we are hinting at Red Alert ), this game would be an absolute masterpiece. But even the destruction of planets does not make you want to sit behind Planetary Annihilation more than an hour. Instead of abstract balls, it would be better if the developers put the fate of the Solar System in our hands. As it is, it’s just another pass-through project, worth playing only to destroy the planet with your own hands. Once or twice. Then erase and forget.

TLDR; great game, large scale, has nukes, can blow up planets, but can be fustratingly slow in the late game. The game is totally worth your money if it costs less than 5 dollars.

Update (1/27/19): The devs just announced that their servers have been optimized for more performance. I haven't tested it out yet but it sounds very promising.

Ignoring the questionable decisions that the developers have made about the game, in terms of fun ( you can say whatever you want, but the word is real to me), PA: Titans is one of the best RTS games that I have played. Unlike many other RTS games, the game runs on a flow economy, so rather than paying upfront the complete cost of a unit, your resources slowly drain as your unit becomes built, which leads to interesting tactics, like destroying most of the power generators of your opponent if you spot them building game enders, effectively pausing their production.

Obviously, the game allows combat over many different planets / gas planets / asteroids at the same time, so managing your bases and armies at over 7+ planets at the same time can become interesting. Although the gameplay can start to feel repetative after playing for a long time, there are many mods made by the community (such as the legion expansion) that completely changes how the game feels, and adds a twist to the game.

With the addition of titans and other units in this expansion, it allows for new ways to defeat your enemies instead of relying on nukes / halleys / unit spam. For a example, if you can"t seem to control a planet, using nukes/units, and you don"t want to spend time landing on another asteroid and building a halley, and waiting for the halley to hit the planet, you can instead invade a small part of the planet, defend it with everything you got, and blow the planet up using a Ragnorak Titan.

The main issue of the game for me is that everything becomes extremely slow after playing a long game because the servers can"t handle the lag. It can be very fustrating to launch a "suprise" attack onto your opponents with bombers, and having them take 10 minutes to travel across half the planet due to lag, and then watching your opponent blow them up because the lag allowed him enough time to think and react to your attack. Overall, for a game that I purchased for 4 dollars from a sale , the game is a absolute steal for that price. However if you are paying the full price of this game, watch people play the game and see if the sheer scale, nukes, death lasers, exploding asteroids and planets is what you would enjoy in a solid RTS.

Edit: After playing this game for over a year, it seems like the developers have stopped creating content for the game, and are only fixing bugs, performing rebalances, and adding commanders which just have new looks (the community has already made mods for the latter two points, the devs essentialy just integrated them into the game). If you are expecting a game that will evolve with new official gamemodes, etc. then don"t get your hopes up (although there are many amazing community mods like the legion expansion mod which adds a entire new faction, and custom maps where you race scout vehicles).