One of Valve’s yearly, player-voted Steam Awards is called the “Labor Of Love” award. It’s designed to reward a developer that has been continually updating a game for years. Naturally, the award goes to games with big, satisfied communities with lots of players to vote, and in 2020 the award went to Valve’s own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The other nominees were Among Us, Terraria, The Witcher 3 and No Man’s Sky.

Worthy games, but I’m going to make a belated pitch for a left field contender: Planetary Annihilation: Titans, a real-time strategy game that hoped to follow in Supreme Commander’s big robot footsteps, and which has been quietly humming away under new developers for the past couple of years.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Planetary Annihilation [official site] got a mixed reception. On one hand, the premise and eventual game wasn t too shabby. It took the plague-like swarms of units from Total Annihilation and the hefty robot generals of Supreme Commander and brought the whole RTS genre to it s most ridiculous conclusion, forcing you to wage war on multiple globes. If you survived long enough against your opponent, you might even be able to build a massive thruster and launch one planet into another: the game s ultimate superweapon.

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Announced and released today, Planetary Annihilation: Titans [official site] is an expandalone version of Uber Entertainment’s Planetary Annihilation. The original game, Kickstarted and released last year, was trapped in the orbit of two RTS giants Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. Staff at Uber had worked on both games and their new venture was seen as a spiritual successor of sorts, pitting enormous robotic armies against one another, backed up by Commander units, supply-and-demand resource management, and base-building.

Titans adds, tweaks and modifies but does it do enough to make Planetary Annihilation worthy of a second look? I’ve been playing since late last week and here’s wot I think.>

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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.>

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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]

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.>

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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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