Game great, Planetary Campaign bit of a bummer

[Yarhor]

Hello!

To start off, Infested Planet may be one of my favorite games of all time. Got it a few days ago and have been binging it non-stop.

Aside from the first few tutorial missions, I've been playing on the hardest difficulty available - so Expert for the story campaign and Elite for the procedural campaign.

Random Expert Terminus maps have been some of the most fun I've had playing a game, ever. I like that the game is offensive turtling at it's core, I like those times my usual cautious playstyle doesn't work and I need to juggle five different enemy streams when I'm forced into opening a wide front, I like the times when you have everything stable and you start thinking of how to get efficiences enough for a push, I like all the numerous quality of life touches all over the place, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love the music and adore how many times you can change up your strategy in a single game.

I had no idea I would be as in love with the mechanic of free ability resets as I am.

Now for the nitpicks. To help frame this - I like to be slow and plodding. My usual cup of tea is turn based games, and while I like the times when the game pushes me out of my comfort zone a little, I haven't really touched any of the modes that have any sort of explicit time pressure - gives me performance anxiety. Maybe some of the problems I list aren't problems for people who play the game differently, dunno!

That said, here are some of the problems or annoyances I've had, starting with some petty gripes and then moving on to the biggest problem I have:

1) The start of all take and hold maps tends to be the same. Since the game is as risk free as it can get at this stage and there are a few ways to do damage anywhere on the map, first thing I tend to do is clean up anything that won't respawn. Most of these abilities are really ammo intensive, which means that most of your early game is waiting for a bar to refill.

The Crawlers seem to have been a shot at combatting this as being a good strategy, but for me it made it even worse, as I had to kill the same thing repeatedly to get it to randomly move either outside relevant range or into a spot where I could kill it for good.

2) The soldier AI is pretty good, but there are two things I've found myself consistently doing that may as well be automated:


Positioning weaker support classes, Officers and Medics especially, behind the front line of the soldiers that can actually take a beating.


Manually targetting two Snipers to ensure killshots on Guardians before they run away. Pretty sure they try to score kills already, but their low rate of fire means that it's pretty easy for guardians to run away during the time either sniper is reloading.

3) Engineering + Mines is too good. It's a risk-free, incredibly inexpensive way to near entirely lock down any hive. The kill rate on it is far in excess of what many much more expensive, more death-prone assets do. You need yourself some flying enemies, friend.


That's some general stuff. The Planetary Campaign seems to have more issues. Which is a shame, since I was hoping it would be a mode a I could sink a lot more hours into.

The thing that stands out to me the most about Infested Planet, the thing that made me fall in love with the game, is the vast level of flexibility you have within a particular match. There are games where I've cycled through dozens of different strategies, lost control of the map due to an experiment that didn't work out and then reclaimed it and won with one that did. Marines die as I send them to clog up unclaimable ground so that we can push a point elsewhere.

Risk, experimentation, flexibility!

Planetary Campaign mechanics restrict your toolkit severely, especially at start, and heavily incentivize you to be as conservative as possible through the morale system. So instead of doing something bold and daring, I stick to the things that I know will work reliably, and get bored out of my mind doing so.

Mutations should help, but they stick around for a few turns, so you typically have a few samey fights in a row. Often more, since sometimes they'll shift into stuff that doesn't really force you to adapt your strategy in any way. I had an early Burrowing Hive mutation, which made for some amazingly tense battles, mutate into Rust, which more often than not does literally nothing.

There were some things that I did like about the campaign - fog of war strongholds were incredibly fun, though I haven't ever played one without Spec Ops support, and dealing with the incredibly resource-rich but faced paced invasions has been interesting. The fact that tech smash and grabs are an option was very great, as well. All in all, however, it felt like the game was moving away from what made it good.


Some more minor gripes re: Planetary Campaign, in no particular order:

1) Being clever on the campaign map and encircling the enemy did not feel particularly rewarding. Cornering elites is good fun, but the fact that you get resources for fights, not territory, means that you feel like you're missing out on goodies every time you force a hive to disappear rather than fight it directly.

2) There isn't really that much sense of change across the campaign. Having more tech is good, but a lot of it is sidegrades or alternatives, so if you know what you're doing, your kit covers the bases long before you do a tech stronghold. Unless it was a Marine or BP crates, I didn't really care what I was getting.

3) Number of hives feels like it should be a goodish indicator of fight difficulty, but it really isn't. Smaller maps mean less options for "easy" hives, and them being this cramped means they're far more likely to be within activation distance of each other. Had a map where my starting base was within the activation zone of a pair of two spawner hives and in the range of the mortar of a third, with a fourth mortar reinforcing this latter hive, all with a turrent spawner mutation in play. Had strongholds that were easier to deal with than that The difficulty isn't an issue, but the inability to semi-accurately gauge it from the strategic map is.

4) It's a difficult thing to put a finger on, but there's no sense of terrain on the strategic map. Unless it's a chokepoint or close to a hive, every territory is exactly the same as every other territory. The cooldown abilities matter more for the flow of the game than the map does, which, I'm concerned, is a bloody sin.


And that's it. :) If you have made it this far, thank you for reading.

[RocketBear]

Thanks for the well thought out post!

I think that your observations are quite fair. If I was making Infested Planet again I would try to tackle a lot of the things you mention - especially the Campaign issues.