I feel like I cut my adolescent gaming teeth on the classic 4X games – and there were plenty of them throughout the 90s. The whole RTS or turn-based strategy genre exploded, and games like Starcraft, Command and Conquer and many others filled many hours of my childhood (and yes, I am showing my age). Of course, many of those are classics now, and a few you can even play in browser, which is testament to how swiftly computing power has grown. Having said that, there are still some new entrants in that market – the 4X genre is a design pattern that’s proven to be popular and developers are constantly returning to it, sometimes adding new features or tweaking the mechanics a little.
Recently, I played a new entrant into that Genre – Age of Wonders: Planetfall. It’s the kind of game that I enjoy – deep and intriguing back story, complex game mechanics, a good mix of turn based strategy and action, and something that is suitably epic in scope. It’s part of the Age of Wonders franchise, which I am not familiar with, but that didn’t really hold me back from diving headfirst into the game. The mechanics are pretty standard fare for these kinds of games. There are a mix of different scenarios, each taking place on one planet. In each scenario, a motley crew of combatants gather resources, build and populate cities, explore the map, research new technologies, and ultimately wreak fiery destruction upon each other. The game also offers turn-based combat for each battle, which can also be automatically resolved, too. There are also some basic RPG elements, as your various commanders get promoted, and can make use of various armaments, tools and vehicles to improve their skills and abilities. You can play as many different groups, too, including Amazonian biomancers, dwarf-like prospector groups and a more standard kind of human. The worlds themselves are filled with other characters too that your commanders can interact with, influence and perform missions for. The range of additions you can build for your city is immense, as are the variations in vehicles and combat units you can create – it’s all very gratifying to tweak your particular units so that they are lethal in any particular setting.
And yet, despite all of that, there was something missing from this one. I wasn’t sure what it was, but the whole thing felt a bit sterile, lacking in life. Perhaps it’s less to do with the game and more to do with me – I feel like I’ve seen it all before, and it’s lost the excitement it might once have generated. And perhaps it’s related to the fact that I don’t have days to devote to games like this, like I once did. I don’t have the capacity to dive into the lore of the game, and to read every descriptor, and debate the merits of different units- and that makes me a little sad.