If you have a PC and looking for an RTS to play, you can grab Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation for free. Yes, free. The folks at Bundle Stars are giving away free Steam keys for the RTS fro a limited time. The caveat? You have to sign up for a newsletter and join their social channels, including a Steam group. Once that’s done you’ll get a free Steam key to redeem.
So what is Planetary Annihilation? If you once played Supreme Commander, the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation, then maybe you’ll be familiar with the game. You have a commander, and to win you miss annihilate the enemies’ commanders. The commander an build few buildings to start and then you’re off building factories for units, defensive measures for your base, and juggling the resource economy of two- metal and energy. Sounds super familiar if you’ve played SupCom before. The devs at Uber Entertainment have remnants of Gas Powered Games that made SupCom, which also used to be part of the folks that created Total Annihilation.
The new stuff introduced here is that maps are not just maps. It’s a planet, or maybe a few. Yes you can have enemies on another planet. You can build portals to bring your units to assault them. Heck you can even weaponise planets and make them crash into each other. Sounds fun! But if you’re a diligent game news reader and done your homework, you probably remember that Planetary Annihilation doesn’t review well. How come?
On launch, Planetary Annihilation suffers from performance issues and game-breaking bugs. While most of that is fixed from what we have tested (have to verify if the game’s any good before writing this up, because we care about our readers), in-game performance seems to be okay now, but the main menu is absurdly laggy.
Fans of SupCom may be reminded with almost similar gameplay loop, but there’s a lot of missing unit types. No Tier 3 level units. No experimentals- the super huge units that was the highlight of the series. It is introduced as Titans in a separate paid expansion. There’s no distinct factions. You can only have unique commanders, with some of them available as micro-transctions. The AI doesn’t seem to be as smart as it could be, which was due to it being tacked on as an update- the game was released with online-only requirements with a focus on multiplayer. The campaign mode Galactic Warfare seems lacklustre as well.
So, a flawed but fun RTS is free for a limited time. If all of this sounds good, go grab it here. Can’t complain much when they are giving it away for free right? The offer is of the limited time variety, so don’t wait too long to redeem one.