Rather than playing numbers, you play tactics! Prepare your army by merging your forces, then prepare for well thought-out, but buggy strategy combat. You can start playing an entirely different game! Yeah, manual combat adds an entirely different dynamic to combat. The actual combat, of course! You can auto resolve it like a standard turn-based strategy, or…. Okay, you’re getting the hang of it now! It only took you until turn thirty-five after a couple hours, but you’re getting it now! And then you can annex sites for more resources and more strategic placement of your forces, be they exploratory scouts or entire armies.

Take away this, to increase this, and lower this. However, there is great depth in everything, including balance. Were it so easy, you’d have the knack of that in no time. What do the people want? The best I can tell is that you need to redistribute your resources from food and harvesting, to perhaps recreation. Just when you think you’ve got a hold of your Empire civil unrest breaks out in your colonies! I could write a small thesis on how many different things you need to keep track of. Unless I failed horrifically in navigating my way through the numerous menus and technology trees, I soon realised that this sort of game takes a level of dedication that many people simply will not commit to. And in the tutorial, make sure you go in with an open mind, because you’ll be told how everything works… once. Upgrades within upgrades within upgrades. I have never experienced a strategy game with more mechanics. Sounds simple, but could do with a touch more depth, right? Well this is the point where the developer hears your request and dials the complexity up to fifty.

Explore the map, fight the baddies, and build your ecosystem. As a space aged turn-based strategy game, you do the usual. Normally I recommend starting with a tutorial, but unfortunately the tutorial here hurts the overall flow of gameplay.

That said, from an outsider’s perspective, this could be one of the most densely filled strategy games on the Xbox to date. While it is effectively a re-skin of other Age of Wonder titles, I have the benefit of it being my first entry played – therefore the positives and shortcomings are all fresh for me and I don’t have to be biased one way or another to other titles. Where does one even begin with this turn based strategy monolith? If you were to combine XCOM and Civilization, you might get something that moderately resembles Planetfall.

Age of wonder planetfall metacritic