Etliche Bewertungen bei gog haben mich davon abgehalten mir Planetbase zu kaufen kaufen. Hier mal ein Beispiel mit 3 von 5 Sternen
Planetbase is all about survival and resource management, much less about building awesome bases and being creative with building. To that end it focusses heavily on necessities and does not offer much in variety.
The game is unforgiving if you do not pay close attention. You expanded too quickly without considering energy conservation during the night? Your base suffocates. You accepted too many colonists in a short time without closely monitoring rations? Many people starve and it can be difficult to put a stop to it. Calamities not only throw you off, they can be fatal if a critical building is hit or the wrong people die. Once you do manage to build a decent base, the dangers are more manageable, as the difficulty does not scale. However, the game can still trip you up and make you lose if just one cog in the machine does not work as you expected, which makes you look after every tiny detail, even though the game lacks fine-grained controls. Colonists can make all the wrong choices if you are unlucky and this has led to my downfall several times.
Planetbase is unremarkable though due to a lack of breadth, depth and liveliness. You have five types of colonists and two dozen building types, which gives you not much choice and you will have exhausted the options quickly. All buildings have to be connected to the same grid, which severely limits your base planning and makes everything interdependent. Some buildings let you choose additional components, but you will place all of it anyway. There is no opportunity to specialise, research or try something new and trading is reduced to a random merchant. The colonists appear lifeless; they do not say or do anything special and their needs are basic. They are almost indistinguishable from robots.
There is much unused potential. What I miss are multiple grids, elaborate trading, research, individualised colonists (make the stats matter) and a way to actually tell them what to do or prioritise. It needs something more.
und hier eins mit 2 von 5 Sternen.
The strongest asset of the game is undoubtedly the graphics. From the very beginning, you are presented with a nicely done, detailed planet surface, and a module landing to found a new space colony.
However, the game makes similar mistakes as Banished. First of all, it's extremely dry and lifeless. Your crew consists of humans and robots, but maybe the humans are robots also, because besides names and few physical traits, they basically lack any defining characteristics. They never display emotions, never talk, never do anything unique.
Secondly, though you control basically a community of survivors (as in Banished), they absolutely refuse to improvise, which is a key trait of successful survivors. Crews of space missions are actually trained to be able to do everything in emergency - but not in this game. Your sole worker qualified to hold a button on a production machine died? Too bad for you, his buddy medic won't touch that button, so no more metal for you, ever, and your mission is doomed. Last biologist died? Tough luck, nearby workers twiddle their thumbs instead of tending that patch of onions, and calmly starve out.
Everything is very expensive, and everything lasts forever. Usually, a bottleneck in a supply chain forms you cannot solve (the game lacks any sort of actually controlling your colonists), so you just watch that single ingot of metal you need for the next building to be slowly shuffled to its destination.
Colonists interrupt their tasks once a slightest need disturbs them. A bit hungry? Stop working, and off to the cantine! Then return, do 4 percent of your task, until you realize you forgot to drink! Then it's time to sleep, since you are only 70 percent rested! And while walking, eating and drinking takes realistic amount of time, the actual time passes many time faster, so nothing ever gets done during a day. You lack flexibility in reasigning both workforce and ramping up production capabilities, so the game mostly ends up in frustration.
And even though you finally build the super expensive telescope... and laser to protect you from the constant meteors... and a security room... and a security console, you get only 40 percent chance your investment will protect your base! That is if you are lucky. If you are not, your console operator goes to eat, dring, sleep or take a leak, and if a meteor strikes in this period of time, you are done for.
Das hört sich nicht vernichtend, aber auch nicht sonderlich prickelnd an und ich spiele dann doch lieber eine erneute Runde in einem älteren Anno (könnte ich wirklich mal wieder machen). Für einen reinen Konsolero fällt das natürlich flach, aber für mich birgt Planetbase wohl ein zu großes Frustpotenzial um es mir für den PC zu kaufen. Da gibt's offenbar besseres in dem Genre.