Planetbase is a strategy game where you guide a group of space settlers trying to establish an outpost on a remote planet.
In the game you play the role of the base architect and manager, telling your colonists where to build the structures they will need to survive. You will have to ensure that t...
Planetbase is a strategy game where you guide a group of space settlers trying to establish an outpost on a remote planet.
In the game you play the role of the base architect and manager, telling your colonists where to build the structures they will need to survive. You will have to ensure that they have a constant supply of oxygen, food and water to stay alive.
You will get them to collect energy, extract water, mine metal, grow food, manufacture bots, and build a fully self-sufficient base in a harsh environment, where you are always one step away from total failure.
Even if the game is not intended to be a simulator, all the mechanics are plausible, and based on what the expected challenges of establishing a colony in an new planet would be.
Four different planets with different conditions and increasing difficulty.
Mine and produce raw resources, process them, manufacture goods, and establish a production chain.
Grow your colony from a few initial pioneers to a vibrant planetbase with hundreds of colonists.
Mechanize your base by creating your own bots that will help with the more arduous tasks.
Survive disasters like meteors, sandstorms or solar flares and defend your base from intruders.
I thought I had thoroughly researched this game before making my purchase but somehow I missed one detail: the lack of a pause button, the likes of which allows a person to stop the game and pan around and actually plan their build, or stop and collect one's thoughts about how to respond to a calamity. After I discovered it wasn't there I found a post by a dev saying they preferred no pause button as it increased tension. I am old, my brain is tired and slow and I play games for creativity and relaxation--tense situations aren't relaxing. I am truly bummed that I wasted my money on this.
Planetbase is all about survival and resource management, much less about building awesome bases and being creative with building. To that end it focusses heavily on necessities and does not offer much in variety.
The game is unforgiving if you do not pay close attention. You expanded too quickly without considering energy conservation during the night? Your base suffocates. You accepted too many colonists in a short time without closely monitoring rations? Many people starve and it can be difficult to put a stop to it. Calamities not only throw you off, they can be fatal if a critical building is hit or the wrong people die. Once you do manage to build a decent base, the dangers are more manageable, as the difficulty does not scale. However, the game can still trip you up and make you lose if just one cog in the machine does not work as you expected, which makes you look after every tiny detail, even though the game lacks fine-grained controls. Colonists can make all the wrong choices if you are unlucky and this has led to my downfall several times.
Planetbase is unremarkable though due to a lack of breadth, depth and liveliness. You have five types of colonists and two dozen building types, which gives you not much choice and you will have exhausted the options quickly. All buildings have to be connected to the same grid, which severely limits your base planning and makes everything interdependent. Some buildings let you choose additional components, but you will place all of it anyway. There is no opportunity to specialise, research or try something new and trading is reduced to a random merchant. The colonists appear lifeless; they do not say or do anything special and their needs are basic. They are almost indistinguishable from robots.
There is much unused potential. What I miss are multiple grids, elaborate trading, research, individualised colonists (make the stats matter) and a way to actually tell them what to do or prioritise. It needs something more.
The strongest asset of the game is undoubtedly the graphics. From the very beginning, you are presented with a nicely done, detailed planet surface, and a module landing to found a new space colony.
However, the game makes similar mistakes as Banished. First of all, it's extremely dry and lifeless. Your crew consists of humans and robots, but maybe the humans are robots also, because besides names and few physical traits, they basically lack any defining characteristics. They never display emotions, never talk, never do anything unique.
Secondly, though you control basically a community of survivors (as in Banished), they absolutely refuse to improvise, which is a key trait of successful survivors. Crews of space missions are actually trained to be able to do everything in emergency - but not in this game. Your sole worker qualified to hold a button on a production machine died? Too bad for you, his buddy medic won't touch that button, so no more metal for you, ever, and your mission is doomed. Last biologist died? Tough luck, nearby workers twiddle their thumbs instead of tending that patch of onions, and calmly starve out.
Everything is very expensive, and everything lasts forever. Usually, a bottleneck in a supply chain forms you cannot solve (the game lacks any sort of actually controlling your colonists), so you just watch that single ingot of metal you need for the next building to be slowly shuffled to its destination.
Colonists interrupt their tasks once a slightest need disturbs them. A bit hungry? Stop working, and off to the cantine! Then return, do 4 percent of your task, until you realize you forgot to drink! Then it's time to sleep, since you are only 70 percent rested! And while walking, eating and drinking takes realistic amount of time, the actual time passes many time faster, so nothing ever gets done during a day. You lack flexibility in reasigning both workforce and ramping up production capabilities, so the game mostly ends up in frustration.
And even though you finally build the super expensive telescope... and laser to protect you from the constant meteors... and a security room... and a security console, you get only 40 percent chance your investment will protect your base! That is if you are lucky. If you are not, your console operator goes to eat, dring, sleep or take a leak, and if a meteor strikes in this period of time, you are done for.
I decided to give Planetbase a try, because I'm one of these guys who loved playing Outpost 1.
Planetbase gives you four kinds of planets, each differ in their conditions and therefore they influence the difficulty. In the very beginning, only one kind of planet is available, as the others have to be unlocked by "milestones" while you're playing. Also there is a tutorial mission which get you in touch with the basics of the game first.
Maps are seed generated. Also they are plain with some hills and mountains. You can only build on plain parts of the map. The seed is controlled by selecting a landing zone on the planet. Most buildings at start are locked, so you have to build some basic buildings (like energy, water, airlock, oxygen, ...) which they depend on first.
A lot of buildings have to be stuffed with equipment like machines or furniture, which will be used by your colonists and influence their supply with goods, morale and goods they produce. To have enough space for all this equipment, you can build these buildings in different sizes. You can't build your own tubes to connect these buildings, but you can select which buildings to connect to eachother.
You'll have to maintain energy and water levels, but their production will fluctuate. Storage buildings help to bear times of less production rates.
After you build an landing platform, traders will arive to trade goods. If your colonists are happy, also new colonists will arrive, if you allow them to come. There's no other way to increase your population. But you can set a percentage for how much of a profession you like in your colony. Also you can't control your colonists directly, you can only priorize some tasks.
If you loose track of supply and expand to fast, this can be the end of your colony. There are also disasters which can harm your colonists or colony. But there are also ways to increase security.
I was only playing the first map yet, but already had a lot of fun, even though I had to restart several times until I was used to the gameplay, because of mistakes which ruined the survival of my colonists. It's not to hard yet but still a challenge, and other planets with harder conditions are already awaiting. Once your base is fully set up, you're not in a hurry anymore and you can build your colony calmly.
In my opinion Planetbase is a worthy spiritual successor of Outpost 1, even though gameplay differs quite a lot of it.
I'm no stranger to strategy / building / management games like this, such as Banished and Big Pharma, and I wanted to enjoy this at least after the failure that was Doublefine's Spacebase DF-9, but there are so many frustrating issues and quality-of-life faux pas present here that one would think the developers were from outer space.
UI and General Ergonomics:
- You cannot re-bind keys or look up shortcuts in-game, only from the main menu.
- The camera cannot be pitched up or down, and pivots around its center, as opposed to a point on the terrain (if you've played any city-builder, you'll hate it).
- Zoom is very limited and situated very close to the terrain making overhead planning impossible.
- Graphs do not display exact values, which is dire in a game that relies so much upon single units.
- Modal menus cannot be exited with the keyboard; you must use the mouse. Given how often you'll enter the interior decoration mode, this is very tedious.
- You cannot pause the game to plan out your colony, and you cannot pause construction orders.
- Visual feedback as to where you're allowed place your next structure is primitive. There is no grid for alignment, so you're forced to scrub around the terrain and hope for the structure to light up.
- Starting a new game always begins with an unskippable cinematic.
- Etc.
AI and Gameplay:
- Setting higher priorities on structures does nothing. The AI-controlled peeps disregard it and instead follow manufacturing priorities, which are managed through a different menu. The lack of a global priority control leads to long stretches of waiting around for the AI to finish whatever it wants before getting to your orders.
- Trading with ships forces all peeps to drop what they're doing and move resources to it. If you made a large order, your base could well fall apart before they're done.
- Peeps can die or break down while performing a task, which will break the game.
- Etc.
Overall just a frustrating 6-hour experience. Avoid it.
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