Planetary Control! Reviews

You can skip somebody else's turn, 10/10

A "strategy" title with no real strategy. I was iffy anyway since most card game adaptations have disgusting reliance on random chance to win, but here it was especially bad. You won't really understand unless you play it, but it is very irritating to be sitting on big armies of one of the species but you can't reinforce their planet without a special card you may or may not draw. It's very annoying to actually have the biggest army only to lose it to a nuke card that someone may or may not draw. It makes my mouth froth thinking about when I have a decent number of army cards and a nuke, but the enemy has a shield card in play and I don't have a sabotage... There are too many hard counter situations that rely on pure chance card draws to counter for this to warrant any semblance of being a strategy game. It's chance, pure and simple, and what may work in a tabletop setting among friends doesn't sit right with me online. I'm not having fun... There is something more, though. Kerberos? Let's chat... Did you really need to crib Sword of the Stars' music for this game? I like SotS' music, honest, but if you're going to "borrow" from your glory days, could you at least let the whole track play? Hearing the Tarka battle theme in the menu would be a banger...if you let it actually drop. Hearing the buildup part contantly was literally just blue-balling... Also...Kerberos? I get it. You guys like to have fun! I remember when I came across the "normal view" gag in Sword of the Stars. I genuinely laughed my backside off. But! Was it appropriate to have the announcer voice say "hurry up" every thirty seconds? Maybe, I dunno...I'm making some frickin' coffee and don't want the bare bones garbage game I'm ashamed I paid 5USD to "play" insulting me for spending my time making a frothy, caffeinated beverage? Mistakes were made. You did a bad job making this, I paid money for this, Steam is selling it...I know, I know. I still love SotS but, maybe you can do better in the future, Kerberos.

Planetary Control! gives a good first impression, then drowns in an ocean of flaws. By the makers of Kerberos (makers of Sword of the Stars, one of my favorite 4X games ever) comes a card game set in the universe of SOTS, though this relation is relegated to a very brief intro and the game itself having zero story content. The game revolves around five planets. As a space warlord, you are given a variety of cards scored 1-9 that can be used on a certain one of the five planets. You use these to conquer said planets; put up a card or a combination of cards higher than the score occupying the planet, and you successfully conquer it. The defeated army then become civilians, adding a passive 'score' to the planet that makes the world more valuable over time. Once one player draws the Ceasefire card, every player gets one more turn, then the round ends. The score of all the armies and civilians are added up, and the person with the highest score (or highest score over a set number of rounds) wins. The concept is pretty simple. And at first, I liked it! It was easy to understand and play and the rounds go by relatively quickly. However, the more I played, the more I became acutely aware of the game's problems. Annoying at first, then intolerable. As it currently exists, this game is not something I can recommend. The central gameplay loop is fine; where the problems come in are the other cards present in the game. I can't really explain why this game breaks down without describing them, so here they are: Training, which lets you draw more cards Espionage, which lets you force a player to discard cards Reinforce, which lets you add a planet card to one you already own to reinforce it Spy, which lets you steal cards from another player Assassinate, which deletes a planet card on an occupied planet to weaken it Colonize, which adds five civilians to a planet Salvage, which lets you use any card from the discard pile Nuke!, which lets you invade any planet, so long as you have an appropriate army to occupy it. This resets the civilian counter to 0 and completely wipes out the occupying army, no matter how strong it is. Shields, which protects from nukes Point Defense, which can be used when a player uses a nuke to shoot it down and Sabotage, which destroys a shield As you can see, some of these are pretty simple. But a *few* are so utterly and wildly broken that they can swing the entire momentum of a round simply by virtue of having them. There are a lot of board games out there that rely on chance, but Planetary Control! ramps it up to 11. I'll give an example. You have two planets. You suspect your opponent has enough cards to take one of them, but you're also confident you have enough to take it back should they do so. You let them conquer the world, then spend all your planet cards taking it back. Then a third player nukes it, making all these gambits a waste. This isn't just limited to the nuke card: almost every single special card in the game seems to be designed in such a way to punish planning ahead. This is Planetary Control's fatal flaw: it does [i]not[/i] reward long-term thinking, which is [i]sort of important[/i] for a strategy game. This wouldn't be [i]so[/i] bad, if it weren't for the fact that the in-game deck is absolutely saturated with these special cards. They're not some special rare things you'll get lucky to draw once; the game is absolutely teeming with them. The nuke card I mentioned? You'd think that'd be a big dramatic card used maybe once a round, but no, there's at least four or five of them in the deck and I suspect more. I've seen turns go back of players just nuking each other back-to-back, effectively wiping the board clean and making any previous moves a complete waste of time. Every game, whether I've won or lost, felt almost entirely up to what cards I drew early on. There's literally [i]no point[/i] in formulating any kind of long-term plan when any of your gains are extremely likely to get wiped out the next turn. There's almost no way to insulate yourself against disaster, no way to form contingencies, no way to do [i]anything[/i] except throw yourself at the mercy of Lady Luck. You can't strategically wait until you have a lot of cards to invade a planet, because it might and probably will get nuked, because there's so many nukes in the deck. You can't holds your cards either, because they'll likely get stolen or discarded, because there's so many Spy and Espionage cards. You'll be in situations where you're using special cards not because it's a strategically sound decision, but just so [i]other players won't get to use them[/i]. You can't reinforce your planets without the reinforce card and having the luck of also having the appropriate planet card, so that's not a viable strategy either. Then there's the Salvage card, which is basically the I Win/You Lose card, for how you can use it to just instantly retrieve one of the OP special cards that you need most and instantly use it or cripple another player to a point they can't recover. An analogy: imagine Smash Bros with all the OP items turned on Very High by default. Now imagine you can't change that. Literally the best strategy I found was to ignore the entire first half of the round, and only then start using cards to conquer planets. When a valid strategy in your game is me [i]not playing it[/i], something has gone horribly wrong. I'd be more forgiving of all this if it let me edit the deck in some way to alleviate these problems, but since I can't, I can only assume the devs believe the current layout is the optimal one. It's not. It just doesn't work. You feel cheated when you lose, you feel unworthy when you win. Every sandcastle eventually gets swallowed by the sea, but this game takes a perverse pride kicking yours over as soon as you lift the bucket. No thanks.

Nice quick card game. At first i did not realise i could play a group of same cards to attack a planet. Sometimes you don't get many or at all special cards but you can still win or gain points if you wait and attack planets later. The main deck you and the Ai draw from won't refresh if exhausted. There is a end game card somewhere in the deck which can sometimes play at the right time when you control a number of planets and the last round is played before the game ends. Much like a white flag is a motor race. You can increase pop on planets to get bonus score points in two ways, having several armies/cards invade at once and playing a reinforce card if you get one. You can only attack a planet once per turn. It would be nice if there was more variety in enemy avatars and possible planets. As a tip, turn off the voice sfx in audio settings if you find the out of place voice annoying as i did. So in summary, once you learn to play this game and the rules are simple (no tutorial but some rules you can read), this is a game you could play to kill some time between other things. Along with the cheap price, i recommend this game if you love card games. I have not tried pvp so cannot comment on that.

This is a great game. Ignoring for the moment all the nostalgia feels you get playing a game set in the SotS-verse. (I do. love the original Sots Soo much), The rules are easy to pick up, and the cards are balanced enough that there is no single-win-solution. You can play MP, or Solo against AI players. I highly recommend this as a fun, lightweight game that has a lightweight price to make it easy to [strike]sucker potential conquests[/strike] encourage friends to pick up for weekend gaming.