Planet Explorers

Games like Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft have revolutionized the sandbox genre, due to the fact that everyone is able to create his or her perfect world and have a different experience inside the game. However, a lot more is possible, especially when you take into consideration the technological advancements that have become reality in the last few years.

Planet Explorers is the type of game that aims a bit too high when it comes to the elements it wants to integrate, but it somehow manages to respect its promises in many regards, if not all of them. Hence, beside the fact that you have a truly huge world at your disposal, you can also create basically any kind of object that you can imagine, including vehicles, houses and weapons.

The weapons are a must, though, because Maria, the planet you inhabit, is filled with dangerous creatures that usually attack on sight and they need to be dealt with quickly. Speaking of which, the entire story revolves around a spaceship from Earth that somehow crashes onto the alien planet and the few survivors attempt to use the remains of the vessel in order to stand a fighting chance against the native fauna. Not a lot of emphasis is put on the campaign, for now, but a lot more intrigue is planned for the future.

In order to build the objects you need, you must first find and gather the required resources from the surface of the planet. Hence, you can take down trees, pick up plants and dig up various types of materials, as well as use crafting tables and blueprints in order to create the items you wish. Since the theme of the game is still science fiction-related, it should come as no surprise that you can quickly build some jetpacks and freely explore Maria for as long as you want.

From a technical point of view, the game truly shines when it comes to graphics, especially since it uses an OpenCL engine to render the environments and it also employs the voxel technology in order to allow the players to freely toy with the materials. While the singleplayer map aims at a respectable ~160 square kilometers and it is designed by hand in its entirety, the multiplayer environments should also contain a few portions that are procedurally rendered, to mix things up.

Although it is a long way to completion, Planet Explores is already enormous and you can let your imagination run wild, especially since the crafting module is functional and you can manually design vehicles, houses and weapons with what you find around the environment. However, things can get even better than this, especially if the developers keep on coming through with their promises and they listen to what the feedback coming from the players.