Bruce Willis is No Match....

Planetary Annihilation is one of the first kickstarted games that I was dying to be a backer of. The advertised ability to take a moon and slam it into a planet to wipe out your enemies; who can say no to that? Unfortunately finances got very tight JUST when the Kickstarter was scheduled to end, so I couldn’t throw my hat in right away. After a few months, they offered pre-sales through their website with beta access and I jumped on board. I play the occasional RTS when it catches my interest, and I generally prefer them to be on the slower side of pacing, but this title with its fast pace action is definitely growing on me.

The first time I loaded the game and tried out a match, I was stomped flat in no time. My enemy came at me with 100 angry robots, stomping my one measly factory into dust before crushing my commander. Reboot, try again, similar results. I had watched some of the tutorials, but I was determined to learn it on my own. Eventually I had to cave and turn down the production rate of my enemies in order to get any troops on the board. I played for a few hours, and found it to be a fun game even if I never accomplished the fabled planet smashing. Looking back, I am not sure if the finer commands had yet to be implemented or if I just had not yet learned them, but I do recall feeling as though I had to frantically click at all times to keep pace with even the slowest enemy production.

The game-play is a big zerg-y in my opinion, which isn’t a complaint, merely an observation. For some reason I had expected it to play more akin to a Command & Conquer game opposed to the Warcraft/Starcraft mode, but no matter. The style was what the developers chose, and I just had to readjust my expectations.

These wars take place on a planetary system level. With some nice tools you can take the time to create your own systems, adding multiple planets and moons around a star, changing orbital height and direction, planet type and size. You can also have a random system populated for you. I enjoyed building my own, but found the random generation to be a strong tool, creating some equally enjoyable systems to play in. While loading into the game, you choose which planetary body you will set as the home base, and once in the map, you get to choose from a few different initial locations on the planet. This is a great tool allowing you to adapt to the procedural generation of metal nodes.

The build system runs off of two resources: Metal and Energy. Metal is generated by adding structures that look much like an oil drill on per-determined nodes. Energy is created by placing power plants. Both resources are constantly renewing, adding more of these structures increases the rate at which they are generated. The nodes at no point run out of metal or energy to generate. To increase your maximum stored energy and metal, you can build storage units. When creating units or buildings, it draws from this pool in real-time, so as long as you have spare you can temporarily outpace your generation. Ideally you want to set it up to balance or constantly grow your pool, but desperate times…

The general mechanics after that are pretty standard, in terms of unit construction and advancement. Commander makes the first unit building that can create more builders, which can create advanced buildings. The advanced buildings can make advanced builders to create the highest tier.

I set the game aside after a few hours, and let it sit and age a bit.

That’s one of the nice parts about alpha and beta build games. If I am not thrilled with them immediately, I have the option of letting them age, watching them develop and trying them again after an evolution or two. Games came and went, and PA took a back seat in my mind, until one day I noticed on Steam’s front page an announcement that the Galactic War mode had been added, a grand single player campaign. I “dusted” off my copy, got it reinstalled (now a computer upgrade and refresh later) and patched, and loaded in. I jumped into the new Galactic War mode and was introduced to a new galactic map setup. You worked your way through a web of paths to different systems, each allowing you to search for tech to customize your commander. Once you find a system occupied, you fight, and it brings you to the mode I had played before. This time, I found the controls to be more intuitive (could still blame the prior experience on me). Ctrl + 1-9 created groups & 1-9 recalled those groups. Clicking and dragging when building creates lines of the buildings. Shift clicking queues up what the builder will work on next. With this knowledge in hand, my base shot up from the ground, and I had a force of 50 vehicles in no time, and I set out to find the enemy. Crushed them, no problem. No need for upper tier tech, just first tier tanks doing what they do best.

I’ve played through a few more fights, getting to a boss system, which is where my game now stands.

I still have yet to experience the joy of crushing a planet with another planet, but the orbital units add a nice third dimension to the game. Even traveling to other planets within the system is beautifully crafted, requiring the unit to pass into an interplanetary orbit before rendezvousing with the target planet and settling into orbit. I look forward to learning more tips and tricks, and getting to harder fights which will require the high end of the tech ladder.

Someday I will de-orbit a moon into its planet, ending my enemy….

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-Sociopathic Score-

Though I have yet to succeed at this, smashing planets together like marbles, regardless of collateral damage is pretty much the definition of Sociopathic Behavior

-Sophomoric Score-

I get a childlike joy at the zerg abilities. And did I mention planetary bowling (see above)?

-Strategic Score-

The tech tree is pretty basic still, so you can’t really over-think what to focus on next. Given Land, Air, Sea and Space units, I can see a balance point based on strategy forming, but it is still a zerg game at heart. Makes you think, won’t require Mensa memberships...

-Mac

Your Titan is standing by...

First Person Shooter’s and I have a love-hate relationship. I love them when I first get them….until I log in and get headshot 14 times in a row before getting my bearings. Then I hate them. I’ve never devoted the time to them over the years to learn the ins and outs of the game-play style.
Once or twice a year I get a strong urge to play an FPS so I tend to keep my eyes on their market. Most recently I came across Titanfall (Respawn Entertainment) just before it launched. For those of you who were living under a rock a few months ago or missed the massive advertising campaign leading up to the launch in some other way, Titanfall is a futuristic shooter based around a few major concepts:

The first is the games namesake, the Titans. You play as a pilot who, when the timer has counted down, can call in a titan with which to wreak bloody havoc.

The second is the movement system when not piloting a titan. It combines a free-flow movement inspired by parkour added to futuristic technologies to amp this to a new level. These technologies include a jet pack to allow higher and double jumps and remove fall damage and magnetic boots to allow epic wall run times and various other physics stretching feats.

The maps only allow 6 vs. 6, but the third concept helps keep the maps far from feeling empty, Minions. I have read a lot of complaints about the minions; basic soldiers that roam the battlefield taking pot-shots at pilots and otherwise acting like gnats. The most common complaint I see is that they are nothing but point farming. I disagree. Yes, I have been known to use them as a good way to build some fast points in a match that is not quite going our way, but I still find the most fun in hunting down other players. I find minions to be the flesh to a game that already has great bones to build on. They make the combat feel like a war rather than a gladiatorial arena. They appear in small squads, move as units and make you feel like you are an elite unit instead of just another soldier.

The main thing that I love about the minions is how they impressively up the sociopathic enjoyment factor. Some of the most satisfying moments in game come when a pod of 8 grunts drop right in front of you. Even in the mode where these kills can matter the most, Attrition, they do very little. Each minion nets one point, where each pilot nets you four and each titan five. If murdered enough en masse it could be an effective tool to turn the tide from a loss to a win in a close match, but in my experience the minions rarely spawn densely enough to be truly abused.

However, what keeps me logging back into this game long after having reached level 50 is the fluidity of motion. Where many games in the past have acheived a movement system in which you can move around a map as you would in real life, I feel Titanfall, out of the games I have played, marks the highest point in this development. When I logged in for the first time the ability to seamlessly move over and around things with little effort, to transition from running along a street to on a wall to on a roof and over, immediately brought a smile to my face.

I could go on and on with my love of this game, but when it comes down to it, it’s simply an extremely well-made, detail oriented shooter.

Honestly, the number of amazingly fun matches I experience far outweigh the few gripes, but they still merit a mention.

First the SMG; specifically the CAR SMG. I am fine with the rate of fire, and therefore the damage it can deal in a short period of time. It makes sense to have a small machine gun be able to take you out fast. But not from across a rooftop or street. The range is far too long, making it a run-n-gun weapon of choice, barely needing to aim regardless of distance.

Next, the shotgun. Again, it should be devastating. After all it’s a shotgun clearly designed for war with a spray that makes up close aiming needless. But once again, the deadly range on this weapon is too much. If you are caught in its spray even from across a large room most of your health is gone, if you aren’t flat out dead.

Third, a titan defense weapon has recently crept into my list of dread. The electric smoke, which is exactly what it sounds like, can take another titan down through shields and all its health before it fades, even the highly armored Ogres. It was originally implemented, from initial descriptions, as an effective way of removing rodeo-ing pilots from your titan. It was fairly effective at this, but the pilot could still get a good amount of damage in before it would kill them. So they upped the damage…to everything, and now it is basically a kill switch for everything in range.

The last weapon, the one that I have the largest problem with, is a player’s foot. Two melee animations exist. If you get behind a player or grunt and hit melee, you snap their neck, instant kill. Awesome. I fully approve. However, if you catch them facing you, you jump kick them…also an instant kill. Not awesome, cheap. This leads to bunny hopping idiots spamming the melee button, getting that one lucky strike in to end the fight before you can catch them with enough bullets to down them. Either damage on the jump kick needs to drop significantly in order to balance it, requiring at minimum two kicks to successfully kill someone, or they need to add an ability to counter the melee attack, a la Battlefield 4.

Overall, I feel Titanfall has achieved a lasting status as one of the best. It has introduced some fun new mechanics into the genre, and tweaked old faithful mechanics to fit its needs. I look forward to new DLC as it comes, and to see what Respawn has in store for us in Titanfall 2, already confirmed as in development.

Sociopathic Score: 

This game fully enables your genocidal, war criminal tendencies with the plethora of soulless grunts to mass murder, without making you feel like too awful of a person for indulging.

Sophomoric Score: 

No poo jokes, cartoons or kid humor here…

Strategic Score: 

It’s a shooter, so a lot of strategies are pretty well established, but the Titans add a nice twist to the old, creating the need for creative thinking to overcome a full team of titans.

-Mac

Titanfall is available for XBOX One, XBOX 360 and PC: