age of wonders planetfall review gamespot

Unlike Beyond Earth, Planetfall does not let you pick a landing site – but it does let you completely customise your commander.

While the game lets players pick the resource they wish to produce, capitalising on a sector’s mineral reserves, science anomalies, or natural forests and farms will result in vastly more profitable synergies. Each city you found can annex a number of sectors around it based on the city’s population size, and those sectors can be exploited for specific purposes such as science, production, or food generation. A colourful, sprawling map full of relics, outposts, and vast expanses of untamed nature fill your screen, allowing you to expand in whatever direction takes your fancy. The first thing that strikes you when launching Planetfall is how much it looks like Civilization: Beyond Earth was supposed to be.

Gone is the magic and medieval wizards, in are the laser strikes, the flying drones, and the space dwarves. Age of Wonders: Planetfall – the latest entry from developer Triumph Studios and published by Paradox – forgoes the established high fantasy setting for a fantasy sci-fi premise, evolving the series’ background and races in the same way Warhammmer 40,000 did to Warhammer Fantasy. In that resurgent market, games that successfully mix large and small scale strategy tend to stand out from their brethren, and the Age of Wonders series has been straddling that niche since the end of its 10 year hiatus in 2014. A genre once dominated by fantastic Sid Meier’s Civilizations and boring Age of Empires’ RTS clones has been continuously expanding in scale and scope, with multiple space colonisation projects, historical grand strategy releases, and sci-fi or fantasy games hitting the shelves year after year. Strategy games have been undergoing an renaissance of late, what with the Total War series and Paradox Interactive’s catalogue reaching mainstream status at unprecedented levels.

Age of wonders planetfall review gamespot