Planetary Annihilation: TITANS

Good surprise on Thursday night! I finish my working day, go back to my room (just 10m from there), reset my Wi-Fi connection, check my e-mails, and what do I see?

A newsletter from Uber Entertainment, telling me that the stand-alone expansion of Planetary Annihilation was just released. Wait, what expansion? I never heard anything about it before, and it appears that I was not the only one. A nice surprise, then!

Anyway, it took me less than 10 minutes to buy it (€13, I can pay that), to download the 1.7GB of data and to start crushing planets. Yes, yes, entire PLANETS. Because that’s what we are talking about with this game: a giant-scale RTS game where armies spread over entire continents and where planets are just rocks you can launch to the face of your opponent (do you know Gurren Lagann? 🙂 ). Seriously, that’s awesome.

Why use a nuke when you can use a moon?

For me, everything started 8 years ago, when a friend of mine presented me a new game, a revolutionary RTS: Supreme Commander. Why revolutionary? Because it introduced what is now commonly called the “strategic zoom” which allows you to zoom out to see the whole map. That means, at every moment you can dive in the middle of the battle or take some altitude to establish a large-scale strategy. No more mini maps, no more stressing mouse moves to the screen borders, no more struggle to see where the hell this attack comes from: you just zoom in and out, all the time. Believe me, once you tried it, you cannot go back to the old system. (This is not the only thing which makes SupCom awesome, but I cannot speak about all of them here…)

Thanks to this innovative system, SupCom was able to make the battle take place on huge maps (up to 80×80 km!), with huge units which all have a huge range. Battleships fire so far away they need a radar to see what they are firing at, giant units can destroy normal ones by just stepping on them, and artillery units attack bases at the other end of the map . That makes the battles pretty impressive.

Wanna fight?

So when I heard more than one year ago about Planetary Annihilation, the game called to be the successor of Supreme Commander, taking places on planets, using moons as weapons and making the SupCom scale ridiculoulsy small, I immediately wanted it. Badly. But I must admit that it was quite a disappointment: although I bought the game after its official launch, it felt like it was not finished yet. A lot of bugs (and I don’t speak about the translations), an unbalanced gameplay, no tutorial, and where are the super units? The game was nice, but I expected more.

However, Uber put a lot of effort in the past year into listening to the players and improving the game, thus making it much more pleasant. And now, they are releasing – by surprise – this absolutely awesome expansion. Super units are finally back, the game seems much more balanced and we have plenty of new strange, SupCom-style units to play with (like the kamikaze nuclear tank – this one is brilliant).

This thing does not look friendly.

I don’t know if I am over enthusiastic or if this game really worths it, but it looks full of promises. 😀