Age of Wonders: Planetfall

A lot of people seem to misunderstand the game, so I figured I'd clarify it. This is a wargame, not a civlike. It contains civlike mechanics, but if you attempt to play the game passively, building up your empire and economy, you're going to find yourself quickly falling behind, running out of resources, and losing. This is a game about building big armies you use to invade and take land and resources, then turn those resources into more armies, more land, and more resources. City building is far more simple and straightforward than Civ, and can easily feel like there's nothing to do if you're not building armies because city upgrades come far slower than your building of units.
Units can have long, detailed statblocks with a long list of benefits, and can then be customized to do all manner of things. A basic soldier wielding an electrical rifle in the early game can quickly become a unit who wields a chain lightning stun rifle that ignores cover. A soldier with a plasma launcher can equip themselves with a medical kit and the means to heal and empower themselves from the flames they create and form a rolling barrage of fire that incinerates anything that dares to approach them. These are not expensive lategame units, these are basic cannon fodder. Late game can include things such as teleporting tanks, hovercrafts that can call down orbital bombardments, multiple flavors of mecha, and drone swarms.
This is a game about building armies and waging war. If you're like me and your average 4x game descends into a blood bath that would make Khorne proud, this is among if not the best 4x games on the market. If you want to play sim city, look elsewhere, as this game does not cater to that sort of play.

A good 4X. I've only played the base campaigns; this review does not extend to the DLC gameplay or generic scenario maps. Before you start playing, you should know you can speed up map movement on both strategic and tactical layers from the game options - you'll want to very soon even into your first campaign,
Pros:
+ Playing well tactically can let you pull off victories that the army balance would say are impossible, and it feels really satisfying when you do. Accuracy and cover work in interesting ways, and it's sometimes worth it to take shots at 15% hit chance. Additionally, the support skill system is fun to use, though it doesn't feel very well balanced.
+ Strategically, exploring new worlds is enjoyable, as is growing your colonies and setting up defenses and transport nodes in anticipation of what your enemies will do.
+ Decent graphics, light but pleasant lore. Some of the voice acting doesn't fit at times, but it's almost comical when that happens, like a golden radio voice telling me about mass genocide in an upbeat tone.
+ Moment-to-moment gameplay almost always keeps you on your toes. I had a hard time putting down the game mid-map; there was always one more place to raid or army to fight.
+ Lots of ways to customize your units, allowing for different tactical strategies. Sometimes you'll end up preferring tier 1 bonuses that give a very niche effect even if the overall stats are lower compared to tier 4 alternatives, just because you're going for a certain playstyle.
+ Also, the fact that your main heroes are campaign-persistent is nice. On the downside, that did make me end up grinding already-won maps so I could have a power start in the next.
+ Great, memorable soundtrack. Parts of it reminds me of Westwood game soundtracks, while the rest feels like an 80s sci-fi action movie. Really solid, unique feel.
+ Even though I didn't play MP, I like the idea that you can log off while waiting for turns and get notified when yours starts. Given how long turns can take, I wouldn't like to have to wait for possibly an hour, so I felt like this might be worth mentioning for those who do want to play online.
+ I like that you can defeat an enemy by taking out their main commander and their capital, as opposed to having to spend a lot of time conquering each individual settlement and defeating each army. Outmaneuvering them is rewarded.
It's not without some flaws, though:
- The turn timer gets really long past turn 50 or so, and not always for good reason. In one case, there were only a few dozen NPC armies left and two factions that did nothing but turtle. It probably boiled down to trying to find options when they were severely limited in what they could do, but it was frustrating.
- In the early game, losing any units at all is very punishing, which leads to a tendency to repeat battles a lot, which ends up being tedious.
- Tying into my previous point, the tactical AI doesn't understand attrition very well. It won't use choke points, nor keep melee units back to allow your ranged units to bait and punish. Additionally, if you have a lot of army support skills, it will spam them in favor of actually killing enemies. It does sometimes set up overwatch traps on defense maps, but only if it "feels" you can't hit them with anything. You can break it using a support skill and they won't retry.
- The strategic AI sometimes plays in very unnatural ways. It might just be bias, but it feels like when I'm attacked they show up with a doomstack at my border, but they'll be at war with an ally for ages and never move back and forth more than one settlement.
- There's lots of variety in tactical support skills and espionage operations, but it doesn't feel like most of them are meaningful or worth the cost compared to alternatives.
- You can find yourself in a real slog with progress in the last 1/3 of some campaigns. There is one specific Syndicate map with lots of water and teleporters that was a particular nightmare.
The tutorial could be a bit better about explaining some core concepts - such as:
1. you should take your scout units from your first stacks and send them out to explore right from turn 1,
2. almost every colony needs at least the first military defense upgrade to survive random marauders, unless you clear their spawners out, which you won't probably have the time for
3. you should almost always focus on NPC faction quests in the early game and save up influence to buy a stack from them as your 2nd/3rd army
4. having an air unit raider stack can be a very powerful strategy, as they can cross water and mountains very fast and let you do precision strikes
5. before finishing a campaign, kit out your main commander with the best stuff you can get that would work against tier 1 or 2 units, as you'll be using them to clear out the early and mid game for the next campaign
6. when picking new sectors, cosmite is usually the most important to get, followed by influence, followed by everything else. Also, you can talk to friendly NPC faction armies to get them off of occupied resource points - I didn't know this for quite some time.
All in all, I had a good time, and I would recommend the game to people who enjoy Civ-style games but would like more control over their units. I've played a lot of XCOM, and I wouldn't agree the tactical gameplay is all that similar, but it does feel good for the most part.

This game very nearly got a "no" from me and I held off reviewing it for quite a while, because I was trying to decide if I wanted to recommend it or not.
Let me give you the short version, first: I am enjoying this game; mostly. But, there are so many problems with it that I know that a lot of people who buy it are going to come away from it disappointed. It is buggy, it has countless misleading ability/item descriptions that tell you that things should work one way when in fact they work a completely different way, it has awkward animations that always feel stiff and cheap (unfortunately, a trademark of the Age of Wonders franchise), and worst of all... it was developed by a company that is now owned by Paradox, a studio that is infamous for pushing excessive, overpriced DLCs for half finished games while they completely ignore bugs and broken content for months or even years after release. Yet, here I am, with a three digit play time, buying those DLCs the day they come out, so... clearly I can't say that it isn't fun. If you want to know more, read on.
I have been playing Age of Wonders since I was fifteen, and I'm thirty five, now. I have never seen an entry in the series that I haven't liked, and I bought this game as soon as I got the chance. Age 2 advanced the series from Age 1 by a lot, and Age 3 was the best the series has ever been. But this one... it feels a lot like a re-skin of the last one; maybe more like a well made sci-fi mod, than a sequel. If you are old-hat and hoping for another revolutionary leap in the franchise, you won't see it here. Much, if not most, of the content is recycled from Age 3 and while there are many changes, nothing that has been added is actually new. Maybe some things are new to this series, but they're all things you've seen in other 4X titles, before. You'll recognize things from Endless Legend, especially, and some stuff from Civilization, too, and even a bit from Europa Universalis, to boot, but nothing here is original. Even the sci-fi 4X premise, itself, has already been done to death in the last five years, so you'd better already be a fan of this stuff if you're coming to this table.
That being said, I do feel like this game does all of those things much better than they've ever been done before, and presents itself as a very ambitious (if not unpolished) member of that well-known sci-fi 4X club. If you like the genre then you'll find that this one has quite a lot of content and is fun enough to keep you clicking the 'End Turn' button several thousand times (and pushing on through all of the bugs). The graphics are nice, though not fantastic, and the different races are all interesting and richly developed. They not only have a lot for you to unlock and play with, but they have plenty of lore and identity, too. The Secret techs are cool, the NPC factions are cool, and the unit mod system gives you lots of options for personalizing your units as you build your empire. Playing it all over again, with a new race and tech combo, leads to a very different experience than you had the last time, and that's super important in a game like this.
The turn based combat is fantastic, and is among the best I have ever seen in a 4X title. Psychic soldiers who infect the enemy's mind with evil spirits, causing them to explode and release ghosts onto the battlefield, dinosaur-riding amazons shooting laser arrows, bugs that eat you and poop out giant maggots, deathbots that fire plasma cannons that light the battlefield on fire; it's all great. But then, Age has always had great combat. It might stand out when you compare it to everything else you've seen on Steam, but it isn't much better than what we got in the last game, and to be perfectly frank, I much preferred the high-fantasy aesthetic to the sci-fi aesthetic. Dragons, spells, undead; that was more my jam, than aliens and laserguns. I miss the wizards, a lot.
Plus, the combat experience, while great overall, is persistently hindered by ability/item descriptions that mislead you as to how they work. You'll go and use an ability that says it causes your unit to turn rabid, and attack the nearest enemy with bonus damage, only to find out they'll attack anyone nearby and you wind up killing your own dude. You'll activate a power because it says your Xeno creatures are immune to it, and it'll turn out theyre not. You'll target a machine with an attack that says it works on machines, only to find out it doesn't affect that machine, for some reason. You'll try to equip a mod that turns all of your psychic attacks into poisonous fire, but for whatever reason the game will tell you that the unit in question has no psychic attacks, even if he has three...
The game could be awesome, but it's broken in so many ways and it just feels more like an awkward spinoff than a proper sequel. And, because it's owned by Paradox, now, the devs are hard at work on their upcoming DLCs instead of fixing anything, and I am left to wonder if that means its problems will ever see real attention paid to them. Many of these issues have existed since launch, and their updates contain a nominal offering of remedies, at best.
So... overall... this game is fun, but the acquisition by Paradox has seriously tarnished it and holds it back. If you're really into 4X games, you'll like it, especially if you're into the sci-fi aesthetic. If you've played all of the Age games, before now, you'll think it's "ok", and have some fun. But... if you're new to the franchise, and you want to try it out, just go and get Age of Wonders 3. It was leaps and bounds ahead of this thing in quality, had more content, and was a lot more stable. It remains the paragon of the series, while this will probably fall off the radar in another year or two.

A few weeks ago I was locked out of another game due to server issues. By chance I saw that Planetfall was on sale (-50%). I never looked back and became instantly addicted. This game truly deserves all its positive reviews. Even the negative reviews do not report game breaking technical issues or bugs. Some reviewers just preferred a previous game from the same developers (Age of wonders 1-3) Some have criticized the visual appearance of the game. (Looks fine to me, very nice artwork on the unit cards, research tree and encyclopaedia are a bit minimalist, decent tactical combat graphics) Some people just gave up on the game after less than 10 hours.
I can confidently recommend this game for people who like 4X games (Xpand Xplore Xploit Xterminate) such as Alpha centauri, Civilisation, Warlock, Master of Magic, Endless legend, Stellaris and others. It is a fine mix of strategic map management and tactical combat. Tactical combat has similarities to X-Com but without the brutal rng failures and timer (you do have dice rolls and skill checks but you also have a drop down box detailing combat events for all the hardcore game nerds) . Once you start understanding the wonderful complexities of different possible builds and strategies it begins to feel like an advanced form of chess where you want to plan your colony expansions several turns in advance and grab special structures that will give you special bonuses.
Units can be enhanced with mods in so many different ways. Armies consist of 6 units (including a hero who can also be customized with melee or ranged weapons, offensive or defensive mods, perks to enhance the hero or the army) Your starting faction and planet can be customized (in so many ways it will make your head spin) or randomized.
There is an amazing level of complexity that will appeal to most strategy players who like to figure out the best possible builds for their factions.
The game rewards exploration. There is true joy in discovering rare items after defeating powerful enemies in dangerous locations.
The game will appeal to players who like to expand all over the map without expansion penalties. (You still have to manage your economy and be prepared for invasions) There are many paths to victory. Diplomacy may look deceptively simple but it is actually quite a juggling act among all the major factions. And it seems to work for me so far. You must also handle minor factions that can sell you techs and units to improve your armies and offer quests, bounties, rewards or make demands.
AND there is a cool Science fiction story (about the fall of a galactic empire and the struggles of various factions in the ensuing turmoil) that plays out during the campaign. I enjoy discovering the backstory for some heroes and factions. With branching story lines you may even want to play the campaign more than once if you don't spoil it by researching it on the web.
BEGINNER TIPS: Do the tutorial (first campaign mission) The game will suggest you play the practise planet before you do the second campaign mission. Do this. Choose hero Helen Shaw for the practise planet. (You will learn more about Helen during the next campaign mission.) You will feel lost at this point. ("What do I do next?") Find the you tube video "Planetfall 10 beginner tips" by Frost Ees OP
Have fun. Experiment. Discover.
I can easily see myself playing over 1000 hours of this game.

I played AOW3 for over 900 hours so I was excitedly looking forward to Planetfall. Naturally, it makes sense to compare the two.
Good changes:
+ Economics were dramatically overhauled and now there are 5 resources instead of just gold and mana. A lot of ideas were borrowed and improved on from Endless Legends and it shows
+ Dividing the map into sectors that can be captured and improved was an awesome development for the series and it's very satisfying watching the sectors change color as you capture them like a game of risk
+ Diplomacy and NPC factions were buffed significantly and far more interesting
+ The new sci-fi races are much more interesting than the usual fantasy races of orcs, goblins, elves, etc; they feel well thought out although I don't feel they are very balanced
Bad changes:
- Unfortunately, I feel that tactical combat has been changed for the worse in most ways, which sucks because that is one of the main draws of the series. The biggest change is that almost every unit has ranged attacks and every unit seems "squisher", so units die much quicker. You can have a Tier V unit on the field and it will go down to focused fire from 3-4 Tier I-II units in two rounds. Late-game units felt so much more powerful and meaningful in AOW3. Units no longer have automatic zone of control, which means that melee enemies can run past all of your blockers and attack more vulnerable units
- Related to the point above, no more castle sieges. Perhaps its more fitting with the sci-fi theme but city defense and attack combat is much less interesting than AOW3 when a smart player could hold off 5-6 stacks of enemies with 2 stacks of defenders
Overall, the game is good and worth a purchase. But the changes to combat mean I find myself hitting auto-battle more often than I'd like, so I very much doubt I'm getting even 100 hours in this, much less 900 like with AOW3

This game is so rich and fun to play that i wouldn't know where to start. 392 hours played and I still have a feeling there is sooo much left to discover. Honestly, the content, playability, innovativeness and the atmosphere are to be only compared with games from the times where these things were more important than graphics. And this one has it all. If you are in turn-based DO NOT MISS IT. Probably one of the best games I ever played overall.

After quite some time with game, I feel it is time to write a review:
I think Triumph released a great game in a very good shape (very few bugs).
- I'm glad they went for sci-fi rather than keeping a fantasy theme like previous installements. It is a nice change and their artists/designers/scenarits got a really nice vibe/setting.
- The factions (6) are very distinctive and fun to play. They look different and play different. Definitely not a civ where you have 2 different units tops per faction. Every single unit in a faction is different, a specific branch of research is also specific to faction.
- The secret techs (6), which you can combine with the factions (36 combinations then) are also great. Have their specifc branch of research as well.
- I absolutely adore that some of the secret tech specifc units do look sometimes different and have some different perks. This is a return of a nice feature of AoW3, I really thank devs and artists for not dropping this. I will give an example: Promothean has a unit called purifiers. With vanguards, they will have plasma guns, amazons, plasma bows... And this level of detail in a game for me is always greatly appreciated! It really helps to feel playing a different faction.
- UI feels very natural to me.
The game itself does not differ much from the Age of Wonders 3 formula, so if you disliked AoW3 (how dare you?), chances are that you won't like Planetfall all that much.
What differences are there:
- Unit mods! You could get some buffs to units in Ao3, you still can in planetfall, but on top of that, you can equip units with mods that will modify their skills/dmg/defense/aoe, which allow a huge number of different strategies. This is probably the feature to single out in all the new things. It might be comparable to Endless Legend, but this is here 10 times more satisfactory as you can direct your units and therefore craft more subtle strategies (for example, you can mod 1 single specific unit as defensive, and the same unit modded as offensive and use them differently on battlefield).
- No underground plane (like in AoW3). Some people see it as a setback, I personnally do like it as it makes the pace of the game faster
- The campaign is now made of scenarios which are scripted missions on a random map. Outcome can be different (but I didn't test that out fully tbh). Some people dislike it, I personnally have finished the campaign and that must be a first in 20 years that I actually play scenarized maps/campaign in a 4X. It did work for me because some maps I felt I could not reach the end. In another game, that's the moment I get disheartened and drop the campaign because I don't feel restarting a map that I know. Here I was ok to restart because at least the map would be different and fresh enough.
- The city battles (a bit like AoW3) are not of a chore to me (it felt a bit so to me in AoW3). This might be because sci-fi setting offers more ranged units? In any case, to me this is a good thing.
- Tier 1/2 units are more relevant.
So, I'm really glad I bought this game and have no single instant of remorse on my purchase because there is a lot of contents and a lot of replayability (and I didn't even play multiplayer so far). You really feel the love of the team for their game!
Can I mention things I dislike. Actually not really, I really do think this game surpassed my expectations which were quite high from Ao3.
- I still think the game will be made better by expansions (look at Ao3 how it became just absolutely fantastic to the point I would be saying it replaced Master of Magic in my heart. Ok ex-aequo ^^)
- Ok, I miss the fully random commander from AoW3 (in a patch some day pretty please, like you did for AoW3 :-) ?)
- I feel the water part of the game is not as satisfactory as the rest, maybe a balance issue to make the boats less expensive?
Overall, the design of the game is really sound. Everything feels logical, and it is very polished once again.
Just look at my playtime...
Obviously a big positivereview and I recommend it to all 4x afficionados. Triumph know and love their craft and it shows!