I had this awful realization as I got into Planetary Annihilation: I hated the planets.

That's some seriously bad news for a game whose main feature is the fact that it's an RTS that plays out across entire solar systems, on small "The Little Prince"- style globes where your stompy robots, plodding tanks, speedy aircraft, warships, and even orbital units have scarcely vanished over one horizon before they come swarming over the other. "How much," I asked, "do I have to pay for a version with normal 2D maps?"

20 IMAGES

Loading

Loading

Planetary Annihilation's biggest problem is one of usability - and not the manageable one that comes along with being a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, which are both large-scale real-time strategy games with complex economies. Planetary Annihilation never solves the central challenge of its main conceit: how do you make an intuitive, graceful RTS interface for a game that's not contained on one map? The result is a game that always left me feeling like I was wrestling with an overloaded shopping cart with a wobbly wheel, even after I'd learned how to play it reasonably well.Everything plays out via a rate-based economy, and scales up from a single Commander unit to vast armies of several hundred units by harvesting resources and building factories. Marrying supply to demand is the key to success here, and the challenge of managing it at the same time as your battle plans is intense and rewarding, and having to protect your Commander from assassination keeps you on your toes. It’s exactly the Total Annihilation formula, and it’s a great place to start.But then you start zooming out, and begin to realize that while you're able to see more territory, the curvature of these tiny globes means that you can still only see a fraction of the playing surface before you have to spin the camera to another position over the planet. It's a fog-of-war you can never dispel; even when you have radar coverage of an entire planet, your situational awareness is severely reduced.Those big problems would be enough to make Planetary Annihilation a flawed-but-fun experiment. What sinks it, tragically, is the lack of care and attention shown to the details and player aids. For starters, there’s little in-game help, and what's there is worse than nothing. I launched the tutorial to see what I was missing, and was treated to a low-res YouTube video that seemed more like a pitch for Planetary Annihilation than a guide to playing it. Note to developers: Googling unofficial Planetary Annihilation wikis to learn the basics of your game’s controls is not an appropriate substitute for a manual, and promo videos explaining the rudiments of RTS games are not substitutes for a tutorial.To Planetary Annihilation's credit, the "picture-in-picture" option makes it easier to juggle two things at once, and does a great job of giving multi-monitor advantages to single-monitor users. On the other hand, it's not as good as actual multi-monitor support, a feature that’s desperately needed but does not seem to be supported. In fact, I think my preferred setup for play would be one of those banks of security camera monitors - maybe then I could see all the angles I need to..Even more unforgivable is the lack of a save option, either in single-player skirmish or in multiplayer. (There’s no single-player campaign.) This is a big game and, like a lot of its predecessors, things can drag on for more than an hour as up to eight sides bash away at each other. Yet Planetary Annihilation gives you no option to save your skirmish or multiplayer game to pick it up later. That's a shocking oversight, as is the fact that you must be online to play even a single-player skirmish.On the other hand, it's in keeping with a general "half-baked" quality that pervades Planetary Annihilation. There's no faction design, just different skins for the all-important Commander units who lead identical armies of robots and tanks. Maybe faction design matters slightly less in this style of RTS, where mass production and weight of numbers carries the day over individual unit tactics, but the lack of variety is still disappointing.Even the good ideas end up going to waste. Planetary Annihilation has a promising "Galactic War" mode in which you lead your faction from system to system, headhunting other commanders, unlocking new techs, and conquering territory. Trouble is, it's paper-thin and once again badly executed.The "strategic" layer is no such thing. Your choice of where to go and who to fight is entirely meaningless. It is effectively solitaire. Second, you only have access to a fraction of the tech tree. You have to expand your options by exploring the galaxy as your conquer it, and choosing which techs to keep and which to permanently discard.That's a nifty idea, except that it's so restrictive as to be annoying after a little while. For instance, in one mission I ended up stuck on two planets, but I was tech-locked out of the orbital combat units I needed to clear the space above my AI adversary's final stronghold. My unarmed transports were swarmed by his orbital interceptors every time, and I could never establish a foothold. So I had no choice but to build a battery of 14 nuclear missile launchers and just spam the planet until, by blind luck, I nailed his Commander. It was a 100-minute match, and 40 minutes of that was just waiting for missiles to finish. I guess I could have built giant engines to smash one heavenly body into another, but only on certain maps that have crashable asteroids – and that would’ve taken even longer. Besides, I don't think I had that technology, either.Sadly, that was one of the better solo games in Galactic War. The AI doesn't seem to know what to make of the limited build options, and rarely put up a fight. Too often, I'd find the enemy Commander just running around the wilderness, waiting to get mugged. In a skirmish, the AI held its own, but the Galactic War adversary seemed to have trouble building a factory. It's just no fun playing such an opponent, so what could have been a gentle, easy way to learn to play turns into a slog from one star system to another.But the biggest problem with Planetary Annihilation is that it's nowhere near as good as the games its consciously aping. Total Annihilation, made all the way back in 1997, is still better than this game. Either of the Supreme Commander games (and especially Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance ) leaves Planetary Annihilation in the dust, and they're a whole lot cheaper. There is simply no reason to play this game when those others are still better in every respect.