Planetary Annihilation

In interviews with PC Gamer and Joystiq, lead developer Jon Mavor explained that the scale and pacing of Planetary Annihilation varies greatly. Matches can be as short as 30-minute skirmishes between two players or extend into long battles spanning multiple worlds with many participants. Although the team aimed to support 40-player matches, this feature was not available at launch.

The game is set across procedurally generated planetary systems containing planets, moons, asteroids and gas giants. Each celestial body has different terrain, biomes and resource distribution. Players can establish control over multiple worlds, defend their holdings or use asteroids and moons as weapons by moving them into enemy planets. Entire planets can also be destroyed through special structures, and matches often involve managing multiple fronts across several worlds.

Jon Mavor wrote the graphics engine for Total Annihilation and was also the lead programmer on Supreme Commander. The game's art style was created by Steve Thompson, who also previously worked on Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. Voice actor John Patrick Lowrie, who did all the narrations for Total Annihilation, did the narrations for Planetary Annihilation as well.

According to Mavor, while game visualization began in May 2012, three months prior to the game's public announcement, the game concept itself had been in development for approximately three years by that time. Additionally, the server and game engine technologies that would underpin the game had been in development for several years prior to the game's public reveal, with some of the server technology having already made its way into PlayFab, Uber Entertainment's back-end server network.

Planetary Annihilation received a mixed reception upon release. The game was praised for its ambitious concept, but criticized for playability and overall incompleteness. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Brendan Caldwell writes: "Planetary Annihilation is a slick, modernised RTS, engineered from the ground up to appeal to the fast-paced, competitive, hotkey-loving esports crowd". PC Gamer's Emanuel Maiberg, experiencing hard to learn gameplay unaided by proper tutorials and disrupted by technical issues, states: "I know there's a great, massive RTS beneath all these issues.

I've seen glimpses of it when everything works correctly, but at the moment I can't recommend Planetary Annihilation without a warning that it's bound to disappoint and frustrate, even if you do teach yourself to play it". IGN's Rob Zacny summarizes: "A cool idea about robot armies battling across an entire solar system breaks apart when the realities of controlling multiple worlds at the same time set in".