You have to get your head around the unintuitive sci-fi names of many technologies, structures, and units, but hover the mouse over Kinetic Force Manipulation to bring up the tooltip and you quickly realize it simply means 'Better Guns.'

You colonize unclaimed sectors and upgrade them to specialize in supplying your colony with food, energy, research, or production. You build military units to go to war or to protect your newly acquired holdings. Regardless of whether you opt for the campaign or a scenario, you begin with a single settlement and gradually take over adjacent sectors to secure access to their resources. Such quests not only keep you engaged with interfactional diplomacy but also serve to provide clear motivation for exploring new areas and expanding your borders in specific directions. One faction might task you with helping them complete some important research, while another urges you to hunt down a pack of troublesome enemies pillaging their lands. The random scenario mode can't rely on the scripted story of the campaign, but each procedurally generated map still supports the same dynamic quest system. Each faction, even the minor indigenous ones, is busy cultivating relationships with the others, and it soon becomes clear that every new decision you make will ripple out and meaningfully affect your standing in the world. Later you might encounter a third faction who promises you some vital insight into your own objectives in return for betraying the friendship you recently forged. Visit a foreign colony and you might trigger a conversation between your commander and another faction leader in which you're asked to perform a quest to gain their favor. The 13 campaign missions, which let you play as all six of the game's half-dozen factions, are peppered with scripted story beats that succeed in fleshing out the history of and relations between the various civilizations.

This emphasis on archaeology is more prevalent in the surprisingly substantial campaign mode than in the randomly-rolled maps of the scenario mode. In a sense it becomes a 5X game, allowing you to exhume and reclaim traces of your civilization's history. But in the light narrative touch of a quest system that gives voice and purpose to everyone you meet, there are moments of reconnection and rediscovery.

There is still war to be had, there are still peoples to displace-this remains a 4X game in the Sid Meier tradition. Instead of conquering a new world, you are returning home ages after a calamity drove your ancestors away. Age of Wonders: Planetfall offers a different perspective.

Age of wonders: planetfall review