Released initially for PC, Planetbase is an excellent space-themed strategy game by Madruga Works. I was incredibly excited to review this game, as I’ve been craving something akin to Caesar III (a city-building strategy game), which isn’t available on the platforms I have. Making the game themed around space and exoplanet colonization provides an opportunity to introduce futuristic tech and unique problems to city management. Needless to say, this game delivers on the satisfaction and incredible difficulty of running a space colony. In fact, the tutorial is deceptively easy, and I dove right into the first planet with a fair amount of cockiness. Five failed colonies later, and I learned one of the crucial lessons of playing Planetbase: take things slow.
Again, the premise of the game is fairly simple: build and manage a successful colony composed of workers, engineers, medics, biologists and guards. You have to carefully supervise the production of critical resources like power, water, food, and oxygen, but in order to be truly prosperous, you have to also balance advanced resources like bots, semiconductors, spare parts, weapons and medicine. The creation of a starport allows for interaction with traders who sell supplementary resources and patents for more advanced items, and it also allows colony ships to land with more settlers for your burgeoning city. Eventually, if your city earns enough prestige, visitors will come and spend money on the colony’s amenities. Allowing visitors comes with a risk of armed intruders though, so ensuring you have armed guards to patrol the colony is critical.
The game isn’t without some flaws, however. How to increase prestige and the role it plays in colony development isn’t adequately explained. In fact, very little is explained in the tutorial, and the game encourages you to jump in and fail repeatedly until you learn the mechanics. Although some may find this incredibly frustrating, I really enjoyed the challenge, which I rarely find in games anymore. Given how challenging the game can be, I rapidly become irritated at the fact the game doesn’t give you the tools to micromanage your colonists. Any good city-building game should have these options, even if the default is to allow the AI to make decisions. Civilization V is a great example of this, as you could choose whether to micromanage units or allow them to be automated. Caesar III, in contrast, did not have unit management and therefore there are numerous guides on how to structure your pathways in ridiculously obtuse ways to force units to go where they need to. Planetbase fails in this regard and it can be beyond aggravating to have critical emergencies and be unable to manually direct resources and workers. Unlike workers in Age of Empires who build things in the order you select them, for example, Planetbase workers will haphazardly stick resources on build sites, regardless of whether previous buildings were created or not. This restricts the game’s pace significantly and forces the player to expand very carefully and slowly.
Planetbase is also ridiculously inaccessible. The only settings are for controller vibration and sound volume. The controls could be remapped to allow for single-handed usage, but the lack of settings in the game prevents many disabled players from playing. Even separate from disability, the inability to turn off alerts that I didn’t have any spare parts, for example, became a huge annoyance, especially as the game decides to repeatedly alert you every few minutes. This seems to be a theme in Planetbase’s flaws and one that could be easily avoided if the developers would give the player more control over the game’s settings and the colony’s functions.
Summary
Overall, though, this is a game that I quickly became immersed in and one of the few review games that I will continue to play and replay even after my review is finished!
Jess contributed 16 articles to ICXM in 2017, covering game reviews, and Xbox news with a focus on hands-on impressions and verified-source reporting. Their bylines on the site span the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @Enceladosaurus.