As the general of the Terran army you must wage war against the Protoids -
destroy their bases and reign supreme. This is my review of Planet X2 - a
real-time strategy game developed by David Murray otherwise known as the
8-bit guy for the Commodore 64.
Before I start the review I want to mention that this is a beta or
pre-release copy that David has sent me for review so there are some bugs that I
encountered in this game that are fixed in the final release that you'll be
playing if you decide to pick the game up so with that said let's go ahead and
jump into the review.
Welcome to Planet X2 - the basic strategy is to locate and
gather resources build your base and your offensive units and destroy the
enemy. Resources come in the form of minerals - rocks and crystals. Methane gas
is located on these volcano looking vents and energy from the Sun needs to
be collected in order to build your structures and units. Each structure and
unit you build uses resources so it's important to start building your supply
up. Your builder units will gather your materials they will also mow through
trees and be used for exploration of the map - be careful though, builders have no
offensive capabilities at all and are exposed
if close to enemy units. A factory is your main building and will store all
your materials that you've gathered and will allow you to construct more
builders and tank units. You can build more than one factory, when the enemy
wipes out all your factories the game is over. Solar panels can be built to gather
energy you can create solar panels anywhere on the map that you've
discovered the more solar panels you build the faster your energy suppliers
will increase. Tanks and missile silos are your offensive options. Tanks can
fire at anything. Press "space" and then select your target and then press "space"
again to fire. You can double tap space to repeat the same attack. Tanks can also
self-destruct that causes a large explosion and will destroy everything in
its radius. Finally a tank can be locked down and turned into sentry mode that
will guard the area around it. Tanks and builders can't cross water so
you will need to build bridges some enemy bases are behind water so this is
necessary in order to push forward to locate and attack the enemy. You can even
build a wall around your base which will keep the enemy out but at the cost of
minerals and time. Missile silos are used to build and launch missiles with no
limit on their range they pack a devastating punch and can wipe out an
enemy base from afar. However you must locate your enemy base first. Sending out
tanks or builders to scout ahead while building missile silos is my strategy of
choice, but be warned the enemy has its own plans to take you out! The enemy
Protoid base consists of a pyramid guarded by sentry pods. These pods will
attack any Terran unit that gets close enough. Just like the Terran factories
the Protoid can build more than one pyramid and each pyramid can have its
own sentry pods. The Protoids will send out scouts to look for your base.
They can also sabotage and destroy your refineries, solar panels and tanks. With
the ability to swim across water, they don't travel in large groups and it's
easy to miss them because you may not always know when they are attacking.
In order to beat the Protoids you must destroy all of their pyramids.
This is a real-time strategy game for the Commodore 64 that's very fun and
addictive. If you are a fan of Dune 2 or Starcraft you will feel right at home
here. Technically it's very impressive that a
game like this is even possible on the C64. The 8-bit Guy makes a claim that
it's possibly the only real-time C64 strategy game around and he might be
right. There are 9 different maps to play and three difficulty settings.
A single game can easily reach twenty minutes or longer and there's that
"just one more game" addictive quality about it. The game was written in 100% assembly
language and it runs really well it's also a true multitasking game by that I
mean you can switch units and structures anytime you like even if they are
occupied. I found the easy difficulty a good introduction to get used to the
game because there is a learning curve. You need to sink some time into this one
If you're expecting to master and get good at this game on your first try then
this may not be the right game for you. It took me six attempts to defeat the
protoids but the first time I won it was a great feeling !
There you go victory! We ended up beating the Protoids on that map
Medium and hard settings really increase the difficulty. You begin with
much less resources in medium and on hard you begin with none. Gathering
resources needs to be the first order of business in order for you to win.
The user interface has been influenced by the Ultima games and the control is
entirely keyboard driven .The keyboard control feels a very natural I really
appreciate the WASD keyboard movement - once you learn the keyboard you will be
selecting, moving and building units and structures in no time. The manual is very
well put together. David even talks about the design and development decisions he
made about the game and goes into some detail in how he squeezed it all into 64
kilobytes of memory. There has been a lot of care and attention put into this game.
Everything from the game itself, to the box art and packaging
It's not a perfect game however. There are a few things or an extra bit of
polish I wish the game had that I want to talk about. Once you've learned how to
beat an enemy on a map you've effectively trivialized that map. If you
repeat your steps you will win every single time this is due to the fact that
the enemy bases and your base spawns in exactly the same XY coordinates.
However the game has 9 maps to pick from so this isn't a huge deal. Each map has its
own enemy placements so exploring and winning on all the maps will take you
many many hours. So just move on to the next map and on to the next challenge.
The in-game music is very repetitive and gets on your nerves pretty quick. The
tune is great but feels unfinished this may be due to memory limitations but
every good C64 game needs a good SID soundtrack you'll find most likely
turning the music off pretty quickly. Just press "M" to switch to sound effects.
I will say that because I'm playing a beta release that this may change for
the final release, but to help with this the game does come with a complete
soundtrack on MP3 and Cassette to listen to as you play the game so I recommend
you do that instead and keep the sound effects turned on. I also want to talk
about the loading speed. On a real C64 Planet X2 loads fairly quick. When you
start a game there is an additional load for the map. One thing that could be
improved is that once you've entered a game and you start a new one with the
same map, currently it loads it from disk all over again. On a real C64 this is a
25 second delay an additional wear on the disk and the disk drive. What I'd
like to see is if the map is already loaded into the C64s, memory it
shouldn't require a needless disk access to load the same map from the disk all
over again.
If you win or lose a game no matter the outcome, you will see a
summary screen. I'd like to see a nice graphic victory screen that rewards you
for defeating the enemy.
There really needs to be some randomness to the bases,
not always have them spawn in the same location but maybe within a small
vicinity as it's too easy to build missiles and launch them at your enemy for a
quick victory once you've learned their location.
I'd also like to see some additional gamification added - For example a high score table would be cool.
Your best times is on an individual map for a particular difficulty level or
maybe some overarching statistics on the number of wins, losses and rage quits
you've had with a disk save to persist them all.
But these things don't detract
from a very good game. There is real tension and excitement when you see the
Protoids coming to attack your base or when you are
primed and ready to launch a missile strike on the enemy.
It's taken the 8-bit Guy
almost a year to develop this game and it shows.
So in conclusion - what do I think about Planet X2 - for the Commodore 64 ?
Well I think this is a great game and I think you should go pick it up and support
homebrew development in 2017 as well as the 8-Bit Guy. He's put so much care and
attention into this game and it shows. Everything from the packaging, the
game, the manual, the cassette just the little extras that you get when you buy
this game is really something you can tell he's put so much care and attention
and he wants this game to be successful and I think it will be I think it's a
good enough game to really be successful and I wish him the best of luck. Now he
also mentioned to me that if the game is successful it does sell well he will
consider an enhanced version for another system I would like to see an enhanced
version for the Commodore 128 that has the ability to control units with a 1351
commodore mouse as well as some additional randomization to the map so
the enemies don't always spawn in the same location every single time I think
that would be kind of cool as well as a campaign mode where you can actually
kind of go through the maps in some type of story mode. I did ask how long the
development time was and he told me that it was about a year in the making and
you know he took on the undertaking of the box and the manual and the cassettes
all himself I think initially he was going to do a Kickstarter to kind of
raise money and do it that way but he's taken it on himself and that's a bit of
a gamble I mean there's there's nothing certain in this world and you know if
the game doesn't sell as many copies as he expects then he's not going to make
money at it in fact he's gonna lose money but I think this game is a great
game definitely support it because you're supporting homebrew development
you're supporting the C64 and you're supporting The 8-Bit Guy which is a great
YouTube channel and a great Youtuber. I tested this game on a Commodore 64
PAL version and a Commodore 64C NTSC and a Commodore 128D and an SX- 64
and the game works fine on all of those machines, so if you worried about PAL
versus NTSC compatibility issues, rest assured the game works fine on
everything I tried. It even supports the SD2IEC
1541 floppy emulator and the 1541 Ultimate II cartridge so compatibility is
100% across the board at least with all the systems that I tried playing this
game on. And also you will receive a D64 ROM image to play on your favorite
emulator and I actually recommend something like Vice on the PC or Mac and
if you're playing on an Amiga you can use something like the Magic64
emulator the game runs fine on that as well I've tested that as well.
That will about do it for this video guys let me know what you thought
about this review in the comments below as always don't forget to Like and
subscribe and I'll catch you guys in the next video - bye for now.
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