Interplanetary: Enhanced Edition

I went into this one expecting a gimmick: shoot rocks at other rocks, repeat until bored. What I got instead was a turn-based artillery game that quietly demands the same kind of layered thinking I bring to grand-strategy sessions. The core loop is tighter than it first appears. You are running a planet-wide economy, queuing buildings across four categories - weapons, defenses, resources, and intelligence - while every choice competes for the same limited power grid. Ignore intel early and you will be firing blind, lobbing railgun salvos at an empty hemisphere while the enemy systematically demolishes your power plants. Rush weapons and you skip the kinetic shields that eventually give you a fighting chance against late-game barrages. The research tree, which is reminiscent of a lighter Civilization V progression, forces you to commit to a direction and live with it. The actual firing phase is where the concept either hooks you or loses you completely. Each shot must account for the gravity wells of every planet and the central star, all of which are in elliptical orbit and shifting position turn by turn. A railgun volley that would have sailed clean last round now curves wide because an uninvolved planet drifted into the trajectory corridor. That unpredictability is the game's signature and its sharpest edge. Skilled players learn to read the system map and plan two or three turns ahead; newer players will spend several games wondering why 90 percent of their shots miss before the geometry clicks. The Enhanced Edition adds Quick Targeting Mode and online AI bots, both of which meaningfully lower the barrier - you can now fill a multiplayer lobby with bots and practice reading trajectories without waiting on human opponents. Building placement on your planet surface is where the strategic texture lives, and it is also the game's most criticized system. Spreading infrastructure across the globe means more power nodes to protect but reduces the blast radius impact of a lucky hit. Cluster everything and one well-placed missile can cascade-fail your entire grid. Critics and players have flagged the building UI as awkward - narrow peninsulas block placement in frustrating ways, and connecting every structure to the power grid is genuinely tedious in the mid-game. The luck variance in the combat phase also polarizes opinion: a hundred rounds can fly harmlessly past, and then a single hit severs your power backbone at a critical moment. If you need deterministic, skill-only outcomes, this will feel arbitrary. If you are comfortable with probabilistic warfare and the tension that comes with it, those same swings read as drama rather than unfairness. Multiplayer is where this game actually comes alive. Hot-seat mode puts everyone around the same screen in classic Worms fashion, which amplifies the chaos enormously. Online play is functional, though the active population is thin enough that the AI bot option added in this edition is a practical necessity rather than a bonus. Solo play against the AI is a reasonable learning sandbox - the difficulty ramps steeply at first, but the AI plays fair rather than cheating, and within a handful of games the initial wall becomes readable. There is no story to speak of, a few lines of context text and that is it, so anyone expecting a campaign structure will be disappointed. The Steam community sits at a Very Positive rating with 85 percent approval across several hundred reviews, which is an honest reflection of a game that rewards the specific audience it is targeting rather than trying to please everyone. For a strategy-and-sim player, Interplanetary: Enhanced Edition is a focused, mechanically distinct experiment that does not overstay its welcome. It is not going to replace a deep 4X, and its building system is rough around the edges in ways a bigger studio would have smoothed out. But the gravity-trajectory puzzle is genuinely original, the multiplayer chaos with a group of friends is hard to replicate elsewhere, and the price point sits in territory where the risk is low. Go in with realistic expectations about the UI friction and the luck variance, and there is a real game here.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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