After studying key performance indicators, applying performance improvement procedures, and following a robust phase of knowledge implementation, developer Uber Entertainment has decided going forward to suspend work on the Human Resources Kickstarter.

That means that it’s cancelled. The strategy game was shooting for $1,400,000 with which to pit Cthulhu-esque old ones against Skynet-esque robots, but after a little over two weeks it had become clear that it wasn’t going to hit its target.

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A lot of people are down on planet-slinging RTS Planetary Annihilation, criticising its recently out-of-Early-Access release for missing important features. One of those features was the ability to play offline, as currently even singleplayer matches against bots require you to have an internet connection. That’s going to change on October 9th when offline play is added to the game, as announced on the Uber website.

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Human Resources has one of the finest elevator pitches I’ve ever heard. The Singularity comes to pass, the machines rise, and humanity awakens a host of Lovecraftian horrors on the same day. It’s a tale of duelling apocalypses. Skynet vs Cthulhu, with humanity caught in the middle. The Kickstarter page has just gone live for Uber’s strategy followup to Planetary Annihilation, and I spoke to design director John Comes and art director Nate Simpson to learn about the end of everything.>

… [visit site to read more]

Human Resources has one of the finest elevator pitches I’ve ever heard. The Singularity comes to pass, the machines rise, and humanity awakens a host of Lovecraftian horrors on the same day. It’s a tale of duelling apocalypses. Skynet vs Cthulhu, with humanity caught in the middle. The Kickstarter page has just gone live for Uber’s strategy followup to Planetary Annihilation, and I spoke to design director John Comes and art director Nate Simpson to learn about the end of everything.>

… [visit site to read more]

Planetary Annihilation is best enjoyed if you are a robot. A cold, cybernetically enhanced supercomputer capable of thousands of thoughts per nanosecond. No emotion, no mercy. Just a deathly, speedy logic and a finger that clicks like a woodpecker s beak. It is a brilliant, ludicrous RTS and I will probably never try to play it again. Because I am a frail, fleshy human being whose idea of multi-tasking is using a fork AND a knife at the dinner table. But you may not be like me. You may be one of the Machines.>

… [visit site to read more]

The practice of releasing alpha or beta games as part of an “Early Access” plan is not, in itself, inherently harmful. It can be quite good for a game when developers priorities are in order and everyone is given plenty of information about what they’re getting into upfront. Planetary Annihilation‘s early access version on brick-and-mortar store shelves, though? In a box, packaged up all shiny and new, bristling with implied promise of completeness and even going so far as to say, “includes free upgrade to full game”? Welcome, friends, to Murky Territory.

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Annihilating planets with other people – orbited by warm smiles and booming laughter – is all well and good, but sometimes you want to be alone while decimating armies and grinding celestial bodies into stardust. It’s a good time to think, to take stock of your life and what it would be like to have it destroyed by space ships. That’s what single-player is for, but for quite some time Planetary Annihilation didn’t really have it. TODAY, though, that all changes.

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Uber Entertainment are making impressive progress with Planetary Annihilation, and we can now leap into both a multiplayer and AI skirmish mode on the Early Access version of the game. Ever the fellow to be interested in varieties of robot war, particularly when fighting large scale battles across worlds whose flavours include metal, lava, and earthy, I set about finding out more. I used my towering review unit to erect a large futuristic facility in which the current state of this Kickstarted strategy could be examined.

Read on for my findings.> (more…)

Planetary Annihilation, Kickstarter mammoth, has launched its pricey beta. To celebrate, there’s a video of a lot of things blowing up. That’s the way.

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Writing is hard. For instance, that sentence? It took me 37 hours to think up. 43 if you include the time I spent watching that bug live out its entire lifespan. So you can understand why Planetary Annihilation developer Uber isn’t exactly in a rush to reinforce its (so far campaign-less) real-time warmonger-er with reams upon reams of lore. At this point, after all, systems matter first and foremost, and that’s really why most players backed the ludicrously large-scale Total Annihilation spiritual successor anyway. But people don’t just strap rockets to planetoids and play intergalactic bumper cars for no reason, and Uber is in the process of coming up with reasons>. They would, however, be oh-so-grateful for a little bit of your assistance.

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