This was disappointing.
I'd hoped that Age of Wonders: Planetfall would be a fantastic and fun new 4x game to add to my ever growing collection of 4x titles. It's just not very good. It's not particularly bad, but it's nothing all that special.
The game is competent. And that's that. The lore and theming is poorly introduced and the whole game feels like a shitty Amplitude knockoff. The empires aren't as engaging as Amplitude and all of the game mechanics feel like higher polished but still as mediocre as games from Amplitude like Endless Space and Endless Legend.
The biggest sin of all is how gaudy, garish and unreadable the game is. Everything is highly stylized but also looks like mush. It's hard to distinguish what's what on the map and the entire screen is littered with numbers and symbols. None are particularly intuitive and each new screen you open is uglier than the last. It feels like a colossal pain in the ass to figure out what building or unit does what or can do what. Reading the scant tooltips amidst the cavalcade of digits is impossible and exhausting. The entire game feels like a screen fatigue speedrun.
So what's the upside? Well the game is competent. It runs. Nothing is particularly gamebreaking. I'm happy that there are some natural QoL elements to it such as all units being able to embark on water tiles from the start, which is something even other scifi era civ-clones make oddly difficult. But that's about it. There's just not a lot new to the genre here. The combination of XCOM style combat is novel at first but loses and really interesting sheen soon after. It's just not special enough. Maybe if the game was exclusively combat focused it could be more interesting, but it just doesn't hold up the rest of the game's systems.
I'd hoped that Age of Wonders: Planetfall would be a fantastic and fun new 4x game to add to my ever growing collection of 4x titles. It's just not very good. It's not particularly bad, but it's nothing all that special.
The game is competent. And that's that. The lore and theming is poorly introduced and the whole game feels like a shitty Amplitude knockoff. The empires aren't as engaging as Amplitude and all of the game mechanics feel like higher polished but still as mediocre as games from Amplitude like Endless Space and Endless Legend.
The biggest sin of all is how gaudy, garish and unreadable the game is. Everything is highly stylized but also looks like mush. It's hard to distinguish what's what on the map and the entire screen is littered with numbers and symbols. None are particularly intuitive and each new screen you open is uglier than the last. It feels like a colossal pain in the ass to figure out what building or unit does what or can do what. Reading the scant tooltips amidst the cavalcade of digits is impossible and exhausting. The entire game feels like a screen fatigue speedrun.
So what's the upside? Well the game is competent. It runs. Nothing is particularly gamebreaking. I'm happy that there are some natural QoL elements to it such as all units being able to embark on water tiles from the start, which is something even other scifi era civ-clones make oddly difficult. But that's about it. There's just not a lot new to the genre here. The combination of XCOM style combat is novel at first but loses and really interesting sheen soon after. It's just not special enough. Maybe if the game was exclusively combat focused it could be more interesting, but it just doesn't hold up the rest of the game's systems.