IGN- I hate PA for the PLANETS "Needs more 2D"

Let's stop beating the dead horse, there is really not much point in judging that review. This kind of thread tends to become a somewhat unsightly echo-chamber.

And really, they did worse. PA at least had notable issues at release (with only some remaining). Compare that to their rome 2 review...

agreed ... i would ask mod to close thread cause there will come nothing possitive out of it ... we have a bunch of more constructive criticthreads ...

Game just lacks a lot of polish. Tanks feel weightless and sort of "float" around. There are no tank treads, physics, ect. Water doesn't have waves or ripple, boats don't leave trails behind them when they move. Planets are pretty barren and lack a lot of extra visuals you'd except to see in a full release. Galactic War is very unfinished. Game won't even start with sli enabled. Textures disappear randomly and units become indivisible (game has to be restarted). Units lack personality and variety. Visual fxs on units all look pretty much the same. Less units than Supreme Commander. No multiplayer progression system (Rank up, unlocks, ect). Editor is super buggy (can't remove metal spots if in the ocean) with not hotkey documentation. You can get stuck in Galactic War if you don't find orbital tech right away.

There are a lot of reasons it still feels like Alpha.

too much water

This one caught my eye.

Supcom has a lot of redundant units because of the whole 4 faction thing.

While many of the units are slight balance changes of the same unit type, overall PA has about the same amount of units as any particular faction.

And unit bloat isn't a great thing when most units are so specialised they never get used.

While PA certainly is not finished I think you don't really understand what "alpha" means. Yes PA is not as polished as it could be. But a game in alpha is ... much less than just "not polished". A game in alpha is barely playable, if at all. I played a lot of PA in alpha already and PA today completely feels not like alpha anymore. Did I mention that in alpha PA had no orbital units at all and always only played on one planet? At the start of alpha it was in fact exactly one planet. As one hard coded single planet. No map selection or random generation and certainly not a map editor.
Anyway I think it is visible that Uber is making improvements, so if in doubt just sit back and watch PA get better until it is on the level of polish you desire.

Also about the hotkeys of the system editor: You can see and configure them in the settings. Yes I agree they should be displayed in the system editor itself, but they are documented through the settings.

Alpha may be a bit dramatic, but it definitely still feels like beta to me. Keep in mind the game won't even start for me unless I manually disable sli.

It's obvious to me that a lot of you on these forums are VERY passionate about the game. I get that, and I think it's great. On the flip side I think the wool is being pulled over your eyes and you are not seeing a lot of things wrong with the game that really need to be fixed (take a look at steam reviews if you don't believe me). I haven't seen any developers comment that they know about these issues and are looking to improve them. So until I hear or see that, i will continue to provide feedback to help improve the game.

that is totally fine Valid critics are very needed. Sometimes it just gets a bit annoying when I read stuff on the steam forums that is outright wrong

And I could certainly list a VERY long list of things I would like to improve in PA. Actually I post about them quite often as well. That isn't bad though, there is always something to improve after all and the good part is: Uber is still here working on it.

Have you seen some of the custom maps people have been building? crazy stuff man.

Are you graphics drivers updated?

Of course!

While I really appreciate that effort, I guess many reviewers took offence with much of the amazing stuff coming from modders (with low public visibility), whereas the core game was little more than an interactive engine demo for quite some time.

Plus, why the hate for the negative review? Guy didn't like it and provided valid reasons for it. If the game is awesome it should be able to convey that on its own. If it fails to do so, well, some people on the internet are unlikely to remedy that.
Enjoy the game and hope for Uber to have learned a lesson or two from how this whole affair developed.

This is Alpha:

The main issue with pa all boils down to the fact there are 2 core groups of gamer playing the game (single player offline and multi player online crowd). How finished / good pa is depends heavily on which group you primarily fall into (obviously its not black and white). As a long time competitive rts gamer, I think pa is really good. the current issue is the games single player components don't live up to the same high standard.

That said the devs have acknowledged that and things like gw improvements are in the pipeline.

This is what they labelled alpha. To me they didn't seem to have an alpha, beta or gamma phase. They had/have a backlog. Which is fine but wasn't communicated sufficiently I feel.

Fair enough, although they might have wanted to stress that multiplayer part a bit more in public, as well as that it isn't your average Joe's RTS.

So it boils down to communications and perception issues in my opinion. And arguing against another person's perception is, let's say, not the most fruitful of endeavours. Plus, those topics generate lots negativity for no gain whatsoever.

Agreed, I think half the issues on this forum are down to this...

countering an argument of 'i hate oranges' with 'your wrong the apples are fantastic' is a quick way to get nowhere fast.

this is rather what you expect from a triple A game made from big publishers

this here however is a small independant developer team with small budged and not a high ammount of manpower ..
and again a 2.3 million funding budget isnt that much when you compare it to supcom fa's 12 million budget ..

I am with you on this, but only to some extent. Uber promised a lot but had to step it down a notch quite often. Looking at you, interesting terrain and pathfinding!
Which just doesn't gel with hyping features before they are fleshed out.

oops

Not the money excuse; please not the money excuse. Were they forced to make this game? They chose to make this game. I have yet to read “UBER proudly introduces Planetary Annihilation, the next best RTS. DISCLAIMER: Please excuse the state of the game, we ran out of cash”

P.S. 4.8 was not a fair score, I would have given 1.0 a score of 5.5 to 6.0. At present; the game is a solid 7.2.[/QUOTE]