Age of Wonders Planetfall Review

Explore, expand your empire and wage war in this new turn-based strategy game by Paradox, a science fiction title that will immerse you with its exciting action and interesting story.

Different from other 4x games, Age of Wonders Planetfall presents an interesting story mode that presents the excuse to learn how to play with the six different factions available. The essence is the same for all of them sure but with subtle differences that in one way or another make you adopt different combat tactics. The Kir’ko, for example, are insects that charge straight to their rivals spitting acid, while the humans of the Vanguard faction rely on cover and fire weapons to exterminate any enemy that gets in their way. There are armies that can take control of enemies using incredible technology, and there are those that charge even through cover leaving no one safe.

Combat in Age of Wonders Planetfall is fun and exciting because it allows you to be creative when it comes to fighting your enemies, numbers matter sure, but you can end up victorious even in disadvantageous situations if you play your cards right. You can customize your troops by choosing what kind of ammo they use, their defensive equipment, attack range, accuracy; you can even equip them with jetpacks so that they can move through the battlefield faster.

As you research new technologies the customization possibilities for your troops increase, but that’s not all, you will also gain access to special operations that are limited strategic actions that can make the difference between failure and success. You can bombard your enemies, summon a protective shield or even request an orbital attack; also in the strategic map, you can use these abilities to spy on your enemies or find hidden areas on the map you can even accuse others of committing atrocities to justify war.

Planetfall’s world is divided between provinces that you can annex to your cities in order to get their natural resources. When it comes to your empire’s management in Planetfall, you will have to take into account resources such as productivity, science, energy or food to ensure that every colony grows without risk of suffering a revolt, you will have to choose whether to specialize your cities to produce a specific resource or for example a specific kind of unit.

There are a lot of secondary missions in Planetfall, so you will hardly spend a turn without having something to do; very often the independent factions will ask for your help wich will allow gaining trust with armies that you might end up annexing to your empire if you use diplomacy correctly. When it comes to diplomacy you can create alliances, non-aggression pacts or open borders to explore neighboring nations, but in the end, you will find out that even if there are different victory conditions, it’s the war that ends up imposing its protagonism. More than half of the technologies in Planetfall are directly related to war which obviously limits the strategy options in the game, even to achieve a scientific victory you have to fight during a few turns to protect your doomsday device from the enemies. As i said everything is war.

you will hardly spend a turn without having something to do.

The enemies AI is really good during the battles, they know what to do in order to hurt you, though in the strategic map not so much, even if you are about to achieve a doomsday victory they seem to have a hard time reacting soon enough to prevent you from winning, showing an excessively passive attitude, however when it comes to negotiations the AI does follow a logical pathway not going suddenly from peace to war for no reason and then proposing peace again even if they are winning the war.

The map divided into provinces does contribute to creating interesting territorial disputes that will lead us to negotiate with other nations and independent factions for control over lands that hold valuable strategic advantages, you will have to gain other factions trust, complete their missions, offer them gifts or directly use diplomatic points to smooth things a little. If you want you can also just build over regions in dispute and turn towards war instead.

With a science-fiction take, Age of wonders planetfall is a great turn-based videogame that successfully mixes empire management with an XCOM like turn-based combat. The action in this game is exciting, the amount of variety in the armies is amazing, and has an interesting story mode and the option to customize and shape armies at your liking. Once the game begins you will be wanting to play just one more turn.

The game is available to play on: PC, PS4 and XBOX ONE.

Developed by: Triumph Studios

Distributed by: Paradox Interactive

Multiplayer: up to 12 players.

System Requeriments:

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 (64-bit)
• CPU: Intel Core I5 (third generation) or AMD FX series (equivalent)
• RAM: 6 GB
• Graphics card: NVIDIA GTX 650Ti 1GB or AMD Radeon HD 7770
• Directx: 11
• Avaliable HDD space: 20 GB

Recomended:

• OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
• CPU: Intel Core i5 (7th o 8th Generation) o AMD Ryzen 5
• RAM: 8 GB de RAM
• Graphics card: nVidia GeForce GTX 1060 3GB or AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB
• DirectX: 11
• Avaliable HDD space:  20 GB de espacio disponible