SPACE RACE

Revenge is a dish best served cold, the ancient Klingon saying goes, and nobody knows this better than penguins. Having made the interstellar journey to this dusty backwater planet alongside my rugged band of frontier fighters, the penguins quickly proved themselves admirable fighters in our war against the vicious psychic bugs who showed up first. As my troopers fell prey to the insects’ virulent battle vomit, the ten-foot penguins swooped in to tear the bugs apart with trisected beaks.

Age of Wonders: Planetfall is the long-running fantasy series’ sci-fi spin-off, the Alpha Centauri to Age of Wonders’ Civilization II. Fans of the series will find Planetfall immediately familiar, as it maintains Triumph’s now well-established ‘faster 4X’ dynamics peppered with XCOM-style tactical battles. What Planetfall has that’s new is a cast of delightful factions that range from hyperintelligent jellyfish to a species that constantly rebuilds itself from the flesh of its fallen enemies.

For newcomers to the series, the bones of the games series’ vision of the 4X: arrive on the planet, establish a first city, research new technologies, explore and inhabit the surrounding areas, and build up a military force to deal with ambient threats and other players trying to do the same thing. But put aside the hex-based world map momentarily, and you find that , included, shares as much with the classic series as it does with . Here your heroes and the armies they command are genuine characters who gain experience, learn new skills, and can bring increasingly lethal equipment to bear on the battlefield. These characters all belong to factions that have starkly different playstyles, but by building alliances and working with local peoples, it’s possible to mix and match units and heroes from across ’s wide menagerie. And because it’s an game, that includes battle penguins.