I was impressed by the creativity expressed in every alien faction. The setting might be different, but the future remains full of colorful characters. Planetfall warps you into the future you awaken from cryogenic sleep to build a new empire on a variety of alien landscapes. Previously, the Age of Wonders series dropped players into epic wars set within fantasy worlds full of elven courts and warring dragons. This new Age of Wonders isn’t perfect, but its unique strategy-driven battles were worth the wait. Fortunately, these long gestations give Triumph Studios plenty of time to refine the strategy and pack a lot of tiny features into its robust combat system, and that is evident in Planetfall. Before that, Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic dropped in 2003. The game also thinks it’s being clever by allowing up to 42 units (spot the nerd reference) in a battle, but that’s just too much and the bigger fights become bogged down and overlong.Age of Wonders is a long-running strategy franchise, but new entries only release every other blue moon.

Once you’ve a few battles under your belt though that doesn’t really matter and you can start to enjoy the differences from XCOM, which include a much greater variety of units, including vehicles, and mechanics like being able to stagger an enemy to stop them using a special attack or still doing a lesser amount of damage with a missed shot. Even though most of the systems, like taking cover and preparing overwatch to fire at enemies during their turn, are very similar everything always seems to need just a couple of extra button presses to get working. As with everything else, you do get used to the controls eventually but it’s interesting just how fussy and unintuitive everything seems compared to XCOM on consoles.

The turn-based combat takes place on a hex-based grid and works very much like XCOM’s more introverted brother.

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