Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Jim and Adam have written words about Planet Explorers, a sort of MMO single and multiplayer voxel-based construction game that’s free to download right now. The reason I am returning to the game is the developer of this oddball mix of Spore, WoW, and Minecraft has just released a video showing their commitment to user-created content. It’s a sci-fi fantasy world with giant, stalking deathbeasts, shiny spaceships, and laser blasters, so naturally you’d expect to see Arrested Development’s Stair Car roaming the lands.
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Planet Explorers has one of my favourite premises for a game, which is: you’ve crashed-landed on an alien planet, now go off and explore and survive. The way you do this is by engaging in a game that is somewhere half way between Minecraft and an MMO. (You start off getting a mission from someone with an ! above their head, and that mission is to hit a tree so that you can gather materials to build stuff.) It’s in alpha right now, but it’s on its way to being a big builder’s sandbox, complete with a voxel landscape that you can deform, or at least run around in digging holes with a shovel, as I did for the first half hour. It’s a world filled with alien plants, alien beasts, and towering robot things. The game is in early alpha right now, so it’s very much a work in progress, but it’s a (currently) free game that already does do what it’s says on the tin. There’s a trailer below showing off some of the delights of the latest build.

You can play it for free, just here.
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Planet Explorers, the voxel-based construction, exploration and critter-shooting game, has now reached version 0.41. It can be downloaded from Gamefront or using your torrent software of choice but it’s a fairly hefty download – 1.35 gig – so I haven’t had a chance to try it yet because my internet connection appears to have frozen as the winter chill sets in. The game is of the sandbox variety but places players on a specific, designed planet rather than a random world. The aim, at least in the early stages, is to defend a group of stranded colonists by building fortifications and learning about the flora and fauna. Two videos aim to show how exploration and construction work. They are below.

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Where are all the blocks? Planet Explorers, available in alpha right now, is a terraforming, building, crafting sort of a thing, but when the player starts digging the earth isn’t shifted in discrete cubes. Unnatural and off-putting as that is, it does at least give the game a distinctive appearance, as do the giant creatures trundling about. Construction is of the fort and tower variety, given that the planet is hostile in the extreme, and it could turn out to be quite the thing, as demonstrated by the trailer below.

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