Planets Under Attack

I sat down with Planets Under Attack expecting a throwaway indie timewaster and ended up losing a Saturday afternoon to it, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on your weekend plans. Targem Games built this around a single tight loop: start with one or two planets, expand your territory by sending ship fleets to reduce enemy population to zero, and manage your Sollars economy tightly enough that you are never caught flat-footed with empty coffers when an opponent swings a three-hundred-ship fleet at your flank. It is stripped-down real-time strategy in the Galcon tradition, and if you have ever touched that genre you will be functional within two minutes of your first match. The thing that keeps it from being a one-trick title is the mode variety. The 32-level campaign cycles through Elimination, Capture, King of the Hill, Domination, Payback, and Boss Battle. Payback deserves a special mention because it is genuinely mean: waves of Collectors hit you every fifteen seconds and all you can do is pay them off in Sollars while simultaneously trying to expand. Boss Battle maps drop a massive, high-population planet on the board that heals nearby enemy planets, which forces you to actually think about attack priority instead of just snowballing. These modes carry over into the 15-map multiplayer suite for 2-4 players, and the cross-platform support is a nice touch for getting a lobby together. There are two playable races - humans and robots - and they actually play differently. Humans spend Sollars per ship dispatched, so every attack costs money from the same bar you use to upgrade planets. Robots operate on a population-based system instead, flipping the economy logic and making them feel genuinely distinct rather than a reskin. On top of that, up to three technologies can be equipped simultaneously from a 15-unlock tree, covering ship speed, population growth rate, planetary defense, and income generation. Each upgrade has a drawback baked in, which prevents the meta from collapsing into a single optimal loadout. The problems are real, though. The single-player campaign has a difficulty curve that spikes hard and inconsistently, particularly in those Payback missions. Fleet management control can feel clumsy at higher intensity moments, and players who want deep micromanagement or unit compositions are going to bounce off this immediately. The bigger issue in 2025 is the online population: this game launched to a mixed reception and has never had the active lobby scene it needed. Skirmish against AI fills the gap but it is not the same, and the macOS situation is a practical dead end after Catalina dropped 32-bit support. On Windows you are fine. For the right player - someone who likes a tight real-time puzzle that can be picked up in 20-minute sessions, has a friend or two to drag into a skirmish, and is not expecting StarCraft-depth decision trees - this scratches an itch that not many games bother to scratch anymore. Go in knowing the online is a ghost town and treat multiplayer as a local-or-friends-only proposition.

Fred · Scout Team

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