You like free stuff, right? Sure you do. And so allow me to direct your attention to the Bundle Stars website, where they're offering Steam keys for the RTS Planetary Annihilation, which normally sells for $30/ 23, for free.

Free does not mean without effort, of course, and you will have to jump through a few hoops to get the goods. Nothing too onerous, though: Sign up for the Bundle Stars newsletter, join the Bundle Stars Steam group, and eyeball a couple of ads, including one for the stand-alone expansion Planetary Annihilation: Titans at 70 percent off its regular price. And then, blammo—free game!

There are no catches as far as I can tell, and I certainly hope not because I tried it myself to make sure it works (it does), but the offer is only good while (imaginary, digital) supplies last. If you want it, in other words, you'd best get on it.

Planetary Annihilation always sounded irresistible. It was going to be an evolution of the Supreme Commander series, and its scale was going to be so colossal that moons and planets themselves would be used as weapons.

When it came out, however, reviews were generally mixed. The procedural map generation created battlefields that were as flat and featureless as a dining room table. Controlling the action on multiple, "Little Prince"-sized planets was difficult and disorienting. There were bugs everywhere, and the tutorials were of poor-quality. Planetary Annihilation's flaws were of a scale to its ambitions, and while it developed a passionate following, it always felt like there was a better game somewhere inside Planetary Annihilation, buried beneath a poor interface and a hurried release.

A year later, and Uber Entertainment have unearthed that better game. Planetary Annihilation: Titans comes out today, and while the enormous super-units are what give the expansion its name, it's the plethora of small, thoughtful changes that make a bigger impact than any super-weapon.

You can't accuse it of being a "paid patch," either. Titans is absolutely free to everyone who backed the original Kickstarter, and people who already own Planetary Annihilation will be able to buy Titans at a substantial discount.

Lessons learned

That's because the team at Uber who worked on Titans understand that the original game fell short of the mark. "We had a lot of goals, and we heard from a lot of people that that original release was rough on Planetary Annihilation," producer Jeremy Ables said. "We tend to agree. There was a lot of stuff that we wanted to get into the game that we just couldn't, in reality."

Uber embarked on a two-stage plan to make Planetary Annihilation into the game they'd promised, if not a better one.

"What we did was we spent the last 10 months just creating updates that added everything we were trying to get into Planetary Annihilation," Ables said.

That meant fixing or improving things based on community feedback, reviews, and the developers' own evolving vision. The outcome of this process is a version of Planetary Annihilation that's a lot more playable and features a lot more variety than the launch version. That's all come to Planetary Annihilation via patches and updates.

"And the stuff we heard that wasn't on that plan is what became Titans," Ables said. "We expanded the unit roster, we flushed out orbital gameplay so it didn't feel so empty in space, we added giant Titan class units, which is what were called in the past Experimentals. We've gone through and added new gameplay modes. The ability to add new terrain to maps so that they have choke points and elevations and what not. And all of this was pulled directly from either reviews or conversation with the community."

Coming to Titans after roughly a year away from playing Planetary Annihilation, it's a striking change. I played it before I talked to the developers, and had a couple notebook pages filled with new things that I didn't remember being in the game at launch. Pop-up notifications that told me when my units had scouted an undiscovered enemy base, or found their Commander, or when one of my factories was under attack. There were planets with vast oceans where the previously irrelevant naval units suddenly reigned supreme. Or there's the way the game simply looks a little more epic and a little less comical: zoom-out and the smallest bots become less than specks on the map, while the most powerful buildings and units are visible from high orbit and cast shadows across entire continents.

Some of it, like the oceans and rebalanced navies, had been fixed via patches to the base game. But a lot of those subtle gains in usability are new to Titans.

"That was a challenge that we had on Annihilation," art director Steve Thompson said, when I asked about how much more playable the game seems. "How [do you] navigate all that? In Titans, we've come up with some pretty awesome techniques for jumping from planet to planet with a picture-in-picture notification system. If you're in combat on another planet, it'll bring up a PIP and you click on it and it'll bring you right to the action. So you're jumping around multiple planets in the solar system, and it's pretty damn cool. I find it much easier to navigate."

The maps themselves are more interesting, too. There's actual terrain that you have to utilize or overcome. Some starting location let you set up a base on a large hilltop that forces opponents to assault up a ramp with no line of sight. Others are separated from each other by a series of hills and canyons that are perfect for setting-up choke-points.

"We've added a bunch of maps with custom-built terrain to the actual roster," lead designer Tom Vinita said. "So you have a human hand placing stuff, and this is augmented by the new terrain features that are in Titans. So we have the ability to setup very clear plateaus with higher-ground advantages to actually set-up very intuitively for players to actually build a base on."

All of these changes make Planetary Annihilation a far, far better game than it was at launch, and that's even before we get to the new units, the Titans themselves.

"All of these changes make Planetary Annihilation a far, far better game than it was at launch."

The most important thing the Titans do is take advantage of the fact that Planetary Annihilation takes place across multiple planets. They are enormous, towering over hemispheres and dwarfing even the largest of the regular advanced units. They are, as you'd expect, tankier and more heavily-armed than anything else on the battlefield. But they also create a more interesting late-game.

Late-game Planetary Annihilation could be a little frustrating because, if you didn't expand to other planets quickly, making an assault against an entrenched enemy was infuriatingly difficult. Their defenses smothered transports, and unless you could set up a teleporter somewhere in secret, it was hard to get an army over there to establish a foothold, so a lot of my games would devolve into super-weapon standoffs. Now, there are Titans that will do things like destroy planets outright once they are built, like the Ragnarok. Or there's the Helios, which will hover in orbit and open a teleportation gateway directly to a planet's surface, letting you blast through planetary defenses and onto the surface. There are a lot more ways to storm an enemy-held planet, rather than simply trying to destroy it with an asteroid or blanket it with nukes.

It's undeniable that Planetary Annihilation: Titans (and the updates Uber have done for the base game since it came out) have made Planetary Annihilation a much better RTS. I've enjoyed playing Titans a lot more than I ever enjoyed the original game.

But Planetary Annihilation still struggles to justify itself as an improvement or continuation of the games that inspired it. At heart, Titans is an expansion designed to make Planetary Annihilation more like Supreme Commander. When I listened to our interview again, I noticed that Ables kept calling the Titans "experimentals," the name that Supreme Commander gave its super-units. It's a natural mistake: Titans spends so much time re-creating parts of Supreme Commander that it invites these comparisons. But at the end of a long weekend with Planetary Annihilation: Titans, I'm not sure whether next weekend will find me playing Titans, or reinstalling Supreme Commander.

There are a number of reasons why a videogame might require a connection to the internet in order to run, but they all suffer from the same inherent drawback: no connection means no play. Fortunately, that will soon cease to be an issue for Planetary Annihilation.

"We re happy to announce the release of the offline server. Coming in an update this Thursday (October 9), offline server allows you to take over the galaxy in Galactic War without connecting to the Internet," Uber Entertainment revealed yesterday. "You can also battle against your frenemies or the AI over a LAN."

Player-operated server functionality is also in the works and will be added to the game "down the road."

Uber recently announced a new Kickstarter for the robots-vs-monsters RTS Human Resources, but said in a prior update that the new project won't impact the ongoing development of Planetary Annihilation. "Work on Planetary Annihilation will not stop if Human Resources funds," the studio wrote. "Both games will have a team dedicated to these separate projects."

The update, as mentioned and barring unforeseen circumstances, will go live on October 9. While you wait, find out what we thought about Planetary Annihilation by way of our review, which you can dig into right here.

Here's what I did right before a bug ruined one of my best battles in Planetary Annihilation: My commander was building power generators and bot factories while a team of constructors scoured a green planet for untapped metal deposits. About 50 units—tanks, mechs, and anti-air—lined up for a portal that would take them to the enemy moon.

Once they arrived and secured a stronger foothold, hundreds more would follow. With the only two resources—metal and energy—coming in steadily, and a row of factories set to auto-build, I'd created an army that would put the American military industrial complex to shame. It covered almost the entire surface of the planet, and as I zoomed out into space and spun it around I was drunk with power.

I could carpet bomb the moon with nukes, harvest gas giants for energy, or build huge engines on smaller celestial bodies to change their orbit and crash them into my enemies. I'll get back to that bug I mentioned in a moment, but learning to execute any these strategies was also far too difficult. The game's only tutorial is an embedded, low quality YouTube video, and it only skims over the basics using a UI from previous builds.

Planetary Annihilation is a complex, massive RTS, where most matches take place across multiple planets. It didn't tell me how to get 100 orbital landers to pick up 100 tanks, or how to set my constructors to assist each other. It didn't explain the tech tree or why I couldn't build metal and energy storage yet. Even now, after spending close to an hour fiddling with the messy key bindings menu, I still don't know how to rotate the camera.

The bigger problem is that just as I was about to unleash all hell, a bug corrupted the graphics so I couldn't see anything. It could have been my most epic battle through single player Galactic War mode, but the only way to fix it was to restart, and since you can't save the game in the middle of a battle, I lost about 30 minutes of progress. This happened several times on my AMD Quad Core, 16GB Ram, GeForce GTX 660 Ti PC, and other players with completely different specs reported similar problems in multiplayer chat and Steam discussion threads.

Captain planet

The Galactic War mode is a series of AI matches tied with a 2D galactic map that for some reason slowed my framerate down to single digits. After every match, I got to choose which system to attack next and upgrade my army with pieces of tech that are all available in multiplayer. It didn't do the best job of explaining different strategies, but it did force me to experiment with aerial and naval units by staggering access to the full tech tree.

The only distinction between opponents is the variation in commanders, which have different constructing or combat abilities. It's a negligible difference, but the tech tree is wide enough to let players specialize along parallel paths. Bots, for example, are excellent in rushing, while a steady trickle of tanks can destroy any base as long as it keeps coming. An air force, meanwhile, can come out of nowhere, level an outpost, and disappear just as fast, but it can't travel between planets.

Invading an enemy planet is the most interesting new problem Planetary Annihilation introduces. Sending a couple of units to build a portal works in the early game, but you can't get to the ground and build one once the enemy has complete radar cover and orbital guns. Even massive invasions consisting of hundreds of orbital fighters are blown out of the sky.

If two players have two separate planets locked down, invading a third, uninhabited planet provides extra resources and another manufacturing center. The endgame, especially with multiple players, is a challenge of managing manufacturing, doomsday weapons, and infrastructure in one part of the solar system, while directing a vicious ground war in another.

A picture-in-picture mode let me keep tabs on both at any time. It's overwhelming, but I enjoyed Planetary Annihilation most when there were too many things to do, and the only limit on what was possible was how fast my brain could process information.

When I put my tower defense skills to good use and established a network of laser turrets and anti-nuke launchers, matches became a nail biting race to build the most efficient infrastructure and fund the titular Planetary Annihilation moves.

In one multiplayer match, I did everything I could to prevent another player from conquering a metal planet, which can be transformed into a giant, Death Star-type laser cannon. I managed to shuttle my commander to another planet just as mine was exploding, but then he blew up my new home as well. In another match, I had the pleasure of crashing a moon into another player, but when I did, another graphical corruption made the spectacle invisible. Planetary Annihilation always reminded me that it was broken when I was enjoying it the most.

When it's working, PA mostly does a great job of presenting these battles by going for "cute" rather than "badass." Tanks don't look like chrome death machines, but stunted toys in bright, primary colors. It's like every unit is the corgi version of its real life counterpart, though it's still intimidating to see hundreds of them storm your base at once.

However, with enough units, the only way to manage them is zooming way out, at which point they appear as small, simple icons. I zoomed in now and again to witness the satisfying explosions and projectiles up close, but if I was trying to be practical, combat was abstracted.

And then there's almost always some technical hitch that ruins everything anyway. It's hard to find multiplayer matches, especially with eight players like I want, and when I do, one player crashes, or one planet just refuses to render, appearing as a black box.

I know that there's a great, massive RTS beneath all these issues. I've seen glimpses of it when everything works correctly, but at the moment I can't recommend Planetary Annihilation without a warning that it's bound to disappoint and frustrate, even if you do teach yourself to play it.