The premise of Planetary Annihilation, as with Total Annihlation and Supreme Commander before it, is that when a game starts you’re placed in control of a single powerful unit called a Commander. Has Planetary Annihilation succeeded in achieving its goals? Let’s find out together.
That trailer alone is probably responsible for getting Planetary Annihilation 90% of its funding, but there does tend to be a yawning gulf between what a development trailer promises and what the final product eventually delivers, especially when said trailer’s sole purpose is to part people from their money. It knew it, too – the first Kickstarter trailer promised a host of interesting gameplay elements such as the ability to send your robot soldiers to asteroids to mine them for resources, being able to fire troops down onto a planet from an orbiting moonbase, and building rocket engines on your asteroid bases to deorbit and launch them at whatever faction is currently pissing you off the most, turning their base into a smoking planet-sized crater. Supreme Commander already took a swing at updating Total Annihilation back in 2007, and so Planetary Annihilation was going to have to do a little more than just redo the whole thing in shinier graphics in order to justify its existence.
As the name (and the Kickstarter trailer, which is a knowing homage to the intro) suggests, Planetary Annihilation’s aim is to be a modern incarnation of 1997 RTS classic Total Annihilation, with the twist that the war is now raging over multiple planets in a solar system. And so we come to Planetary Annihilation, one of the more financially successful Kickstarter projects from the craze of 2012.