http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198030749271/recommended/386070 Please upvote to push this to the front on the store page. "Let me get this out of the way: Planetary Annihilation has been an imperfect game with an even worse community management. I've spoken out against much of what Uber has done both gameplay wise and community wise over the years, including getting a 3 day ban in July 2014 from their forums over an incident where a backer exclusive commander was being sold in the game's shop for charity. The launch of the Alpha in June 2013 for one and a half times a AAA game wasn't well handled and PA was launched in September 2014 in an incomplete state. The follow-up kickstarter for Human Resources was disastrous and I opposed it at the time, although in 20-20 hindsight I wish it had succeeded. Every action taken thereafter however has redeemed Uber and Planetary Annihilation. Virtually every missing feature has been added, and TITANS adds some proper end-game to the game and fixes the bulkiness of the orbital layer. Uber made some mistakes with the TITANS launch, although the problem there was far more with some well-meaning but misinformed users and some less well-meaning trolls who took it upon themselves to ensure that TITANS was a failure. Rest assured that TITANS is worth it as a $14 expansion to the original game or as the $40 stand-alone, and that Uber Entertainment is not made up of the unethical satanists that some reviews would have you think you'd be supporting by purchasing TITANS. Planetary Annihilation is an RTS on a massive scale. After 20 minutes your armies can number in the thousands and your base span multiple planets. The scale may seem daunting, but there are a number of good UI tools to help you manage it. These include Picture in Picture, which gives you two viewpoints at once; area commands, which let you give patrol and attack commands over a variable area; alerts, which tell you important events and can be clicked on to take you there or managed through their own picture in picture; and infinite build, which allows you to order your production lines to produce never ending streams of units. While commanding an interplanetary legion is never easy, the UI makes it manageable and there are numerous mods to extend it further. The single-player mode is inadequate; it consists of conquering a galaxy in a series of skirmishes with initially gimped technology that improves as you go along. Your own army improves faster than the enemy ramps up, resulting in the campaign getting easier as it goes rather than harder. While this can be addressed via mods, less easily addressed is the fact that the Galactic War AI, even on the hardest difficulty, has been made stupid after complaints that pre-date the existence of the game's tutorial about difficulty. As a result, the regular skirmish mode provides a much greater challenge than does the galactic war. This AI is competent and can be replaced by the modded Queller AI to become nightmarish, but it's still a skirmish mode. If that's your thing, then it's great, but if it's not then the singleplayer will be a let-down. The meat of Planetary Annihilation is in the multiplayer mode. The games can range from 1v1 ranked games on a single planet, to 10 player free for alls on the moons of a gas giant, to massive 5v5s across an entire solar system, to everything in between. Options for custom games include an economic bounty on each player eliminated; dynamic alliances that allow sharing of vision and economy to other players before they backstab you; spawn anywhere, which allows you to forgo the carefully placed spawns on worlds to let the player who picked the most isolated spawn win; and shared armies, which allows players on a team to control each other's units and specialize in some areas while letting their teammates pick up the slack in others (or just argue about whose unit is whose). What cannot be changed is the win condition: last team to still have a commander standing wins. This makes commander sniping a part of the game that cannot be eliminated; only mitigated through proper defense. Gameplay wise, the game revolves around economic management and expansion. The winner tends to be whoever can expand their economy fastest and most efficiently. There are only one or two good combat units in each factory, and low unit variety coupled with weak defenses means that there is little room for funky tactics and micro; it's all about spamming out the most tanks or the best tanks (but still the most of the best tanks). This can result in the game getting stale after a while, although this can be mitigated with mods. Graphically, the game has an interesting but somewhat bland art-style. The vanilla effects are boring, but these can easily be replaced with spicier effects via mods. Clever usage of the game's freecam allows for some amazing screenshots to be taken. As one community member once said, you could practically have an entire profession out of taking epic screens in this game. The music for the game is good, though perhaps inferior to that of Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander. Sound effects are fairly bland however, and this area of the game cannot be modded currently. For a little easter egg, type in "+sing" in the middle of a match. There are well over a hundred mods available for the game, touching everything from the UI (such as Ubermap) to the firing effects (such as More Pew Pew) to bugfixes (such as the Commander Icon Fix) to minigames (such as Boom Bot Wars) to map packs (such as the Community Map Pack) to huge game balance changes (such as my Galactic Annihilation mod). Notable is the Legion Expansion, which adds a brand new faction to the game of equal quality to the original. There is a DLC store where commanders can be bought for $5-10. These commanders were designed by kickstarter backers, who receive a cut of the proceeds, and offer no gameplay advantage other than looking epic. The best one is easily Nefelpitou. Full disclosure: I purchased Planetary Annihilation for $60 in October 2013 and received the TITANS expansion for free from the developers for participation in the expansions' first tournament. I chose not to check the free product box as TITANS is a standalone product and I would have purchased it at expansion price, which is a minority of its standalone cost. 5/7 would recommend again."
Tl : Dr -Not much went well -Stuart disagreed with a lot of decisions + drama -Overly in-depth overview of features (plus more not-good stuff) -Mods (plus stuart mod plug of course) -Silly meme to close Honest feedback Your structure is waaaay off if you are trying to recommend the game. This is a 'steam' review. You know what that means right? You're posting a review for people who don't like reading and 100% of your first few paragraphs is negative about the game and your experience. Why would they read on? Then the discussion of features is ok, but for someone not versed in RTS games is meaningless. Like explaining hotkeys to your G-parents for the first time saying "You can copy-paste with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V" instead of "You can use 'hotkeys' to do basic things much faster; use press combinations of keys to do these things". See the difference? Memes..... WHY DOES A STEAM REVIEW ALWAYS HAVE MEMES? Importantly, it reads as though you don't like the game.
The length of the review ain't the problem - it's that all the negativity is up first and is quite damning in the way it's presented. We all know the press surrounding PA - people are more likely to arrive with a negative preconception - see a long review, read a bunch of negativity, confirmation bias kicks in. Job done, I'll spend my money elsewhere thanks See the issue?
