Age of Wonders: Planetfall

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 is easily one of the best newer strategy games (i.e. 4X style game) currently available for single player in my opinion, period. I've had a lot of time to try several of these sorts of games that are considered the top games in the category lately. Civ, Total War games, Stellaris, Endless Legend, the list goes on, but I always come back to this one.
NOTE: Many of the reviews for this game were from when the game was released, since then they did a massive update that re-balanced the game and overhauled several mechanics. A lot of the comments in negative reviews were from a year+ ago using the old mechanics. This game is being actively improved / patched as of Oct 2020 from what I've seen and they're still releasing an expansion.
I'll get the cons out of the way first:
CONS:
- The campaign storyline is pretty poorly written compared to the rest of the game and its lore excerpts. They definitely need an editor. I still really enjoyed the campaign though, and definitely think it's worth it to learn the game. I don't think Civ even had a campaign..
- Some minor bugs encountered during the campaign, but the game is constantly saving every turn so it wasn't a gigantic deal to reload
- On extra large maps with tons of opponents the game gets pretty heavy on the CPU around turn 70+. Turns take around 15-30s seconds for me at that point on a fairly strong i7 from 3 years ago. I didn't encounter this on non-huge maps or when using Simultaneous Turns mode to speed things up.
- The game can be a bit overwhelming if you're totally unfamiliar with Age of Wonders, so you'll probably be playing at least 2 maps before you get the hang of things. I shouldn't need to warn people but 4X games are time consuming, heh.
- The AI could still use improvement. They make some questionable military decisions at times and you can fleece them in diplomacy if you're clever enough. I didn't have problems adding more enemies/setting various options to up the difficulty though.
PROS:
- Campaign is like 200 hours+ of gameplay in the base game alone. It's... quite a bit longer than that if you are taking your time. You will be getting your money's worth if you stick to this game.
- Good UI scaling if you play on a TV or super high resolution
- Best combat system of any newer 4X I've played by far. My God it's good. It's especially good if you like XCOM (it uses things like overwatch, cover, etc. for the tactics). Several points below outline why I think so.
- Even if you hate the combat or XCOM, this game lets you auto-combat on a per battle basis if you want, and essentially sidestep the tactical combat if you dislike it or want to skip trivial fights, so you can ALSO play it as a pure empire building game if you wanted to.
- Tactical battles allow you to re-watch what happened turn-by-turn even if you auto-combat, and also give you the option of RETRYING a fight without reloading the game, which is great! You can even pull up battle replays from the very beginning of the match at any time (say if you forgot what loadouts your enemy units were using). You can also pull out of combat before it starts if you're attacking with no penalty, movement or otherwise.
- If you were a Heroes of Might and Magic 3 fan try this game and AOW3 out as well, they're the true spiritual successors to the legendary game itself IMO! Same strategic map / empire building / tactical combat balance.
- Easy and unfrustrating save system, this thing saves my games automatically going back dozens of turns (in addition to regular save / quick save options), loading games is a nearly instantaneous for me. Taking back huge mistakes is a matter of 5 seconds.
- Several races with their totally own style to choose from, several "classes" to choose from (called secret techs in this game, but same idea). Each combination plays / feels a lot different than the other ones, each mission felt like a new experience to me.
- In addition to the usual racial and class-based units you'd expect, this game has an amazing "mods" (unit/hero upgrade) system, allowing you to upgrade and customize the loadout of every single unit and hero in your army. This means the game's combat has hundreds if not thousands of combinations and strategies in it that other games don't because they don't allow such deep flexibility. Facing a faction of sentient plants? Burn them by adding fiery lasers to your robots. Enemy stunning your robots too much with electric attacks? Add some +electricity resistance defense mods to your units. You get the idea.
- Heroes can level up, get talents and switch out what weapons/gear they have. They can even talent into piloting and drive around in vehicles.
- Units can level up (although they aren't as extreme as heroes). So a "Veteran" unit after several battles would be stronger than a unit you just trained. The "prime" top tier rank usually grants the units an additional, more powerful bonus than the weaker ones from the other ranks. You get rewarded for being good at fighting and being smart with units.
- This game lets you research fast map movement speed and teleporters regardless of what race/class you are. A lot of games become a slog on super large maps without this.
- Pretty good sound track and the racial announcers during fights make it sound exciting. "Enemy OBLITERATED!"
- Tons of space / sci fi references if you're into that. The game doesn't take itself too seriously, but it has some seriously awesome lore and references of its own. The visual artwork is really solid too.
- Founding colonies and exploiting resources: the actual "empire building" and research aspect of this game is solid and not overly punishing or boring.
- Adventure on the map: visit exploration sites and curiosities on the map, fight monsters, gain treasure and items! Do quests for rewards too! (just like in heroes of might and magic). I felt like I was actually *doing interesting things* and being rewarded during the game instead of just passing turns for the empire building to complete.
- Multiple ways to victory! Win by whatever play style you want, including: just murdering everyone else, becoming a diplomacy expert and "peacefully" winning, using a doomsday weapon, controlling the overwhelming majority of map sectors, or if you're in the campaign often just doing the quest lines.
In summary:
This game is one of the best there is in the genre right now as of Oct 2020, putting a particular emphasis on action and tactical combat, although still a very rewarding game even if auto-combated for all battles. The game is almost criminally underrated on steam right now and if you're looking to try a new 4X I think this game is a must try.

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.

TL;DR: If you found the Endless games beautiful and intriguing, but frustrating in terms of mechanics, gameplay, and player freedom? Play this instead.
I picked this up through Humble Choice, and wasn't expecting to think much of it -- I'm much more to the Civ and Stellaris side of 4X gaming -- but, much to my surprise, I found a game which took all the potential of Endless Space II & Endless Legend and gave me something I could actually work with. See, while I enjoy cool battles and leveling up my units, I don't want that to be the only thing I'm doing -- and I *certainly* don't want that to be the *main* thing I'm doing.
Planetfall lets me focus on planning and growing my civilization in peaceful/defensive ways, while exploring the various cool sites scattered around the map. It's much easier to nerf my opponents/make them peaceful than it has been in other games in this sort, and that suits my low-key playstyle just fine. When I want challenges, I go after the increasingly difficult npcs/'barbarian'-type units out there -- which can also be set not to attack, if that's your thing.
Reviewers who have said that you can't play a peaceful game with Planetfall are only partially correct. This is by no means as mellow a game as you can get with the proper settings on, say, Civ V or VI. However, if you're the kind of person who occasionally needs to stomp assorted beings while slowly ascending to galactic superiority?
You can do a lot worse than this.
*thinks* I described it to one of my partners as Civ Meets Diablo, but I think it's actually a lot more like one of my beloved sim-farming games on a decidedly epic scale. Like, you're rebuilding Portia... world.
Add in the great music, the fun voice acting, and, again, the fact that the game is freakin' gorgeous -- call it 7.5/10. I'd give it an even higher grade, but a lot of the fun/customizability is coming from fan-mods and paid dlcs. I'm iffy on that model.

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.

My initial opinion of this game was that it had a lot of options and complexity in some mechanics (particularly combat and unit modding), while other mechanics left me wanting (district systems, future tech). It also feels odd to have totally unmitigated Horizontal expansion- the game forces you to play wide, not tall. A slight lack of polish. Basically, I still liked the game, but I had much more enjoyment playing Age of Wonders III.
Now however, after multiple DLC's and patches, I find the game state to be polished and very well done. Combat / Questing / Unit Modding are just as good as originally, with even more variety due to new factions and additions. My major complaints with the district system were shored up by the allowance of urban districts that both let you strategically expand further than 2 zones from your city, and benefit from more vertical-built cityscapes. Future techs don't just end now, you can continue researching for a variety of worthwhile bonuses - meaning your research is no longer useless later in the game, but continually beneficial. While you do still need to play wide, having additional vertical benefits present doesn't make this feel quite as forced as previously.
Overall, I'd highly recommend the game in it's current state. Great job in interacting with your community and polishing this game up Triumph.