14 DAY TRIAL // My iron and my aluminum ore fields are far away from each other. Even worse, they are nowhere near my biggest city on this newly colonized planet. This means I need to dedicate a ton of my production effort to the production of roads and trucks to carry all the supplies around.
On top of that, I have aggressively mined the sulfur required for concrete, depleting the veins. This means the entire production system for it, from extractors to factories and depots, will need to be moved relatively soon to a better area.
All these obstacles are manageable but require tweaking and fiddling with buildings and roads to get up to speed. My colonists have grown in number, their needs are spiking, and I am starting to increase the temperature of this new world. Soon more of humanity will be able to move in. And they will have to find a way to untangle all these many roads I have haphazardly built.
Plan B: Terraform is developed and published by Gaddy Games. The game is in Early Access on Steam starting on February 15, 2023. The title offers a mix of resource management and planet terraforming, aiming to show players the herculean effort associated with making a new planet habitable.
The narrative premise is limited to one screen at the start of a campaign, although the development team says it might add more in the future. The gamer is on a recently settled planet. Surveying work has been carried out, and there are a few small hab cities on the surface. It is now up to you to extract the resources required for expansion and then terraforming.
Plan B ramps up complexity slowly. Iron extraction and refining are used to teach players about the various links in the industrial and supply chains. The game then adds resources, the need to manage roads and trucks, and the many ways in which resources have to be combined to actually get to terraforming.
At first, I was happy to simply get resources where they were needed and move extraction when I depleted certain areas. But to create thriving cities on a new planet, optimization is required. Good planning helps but it’s equally important to be ready to delete stuff and rebuild entire operations from scratch.
The weirdest part of the game is the interactions between depots, truck stops, and roads. It makes it harder than it should be to create the infrastructure required to move stuff between industrial sites themselves and then to a city that needs certain things.
Otherwise, the experience is mechanically solid and attractive. There are a lot of decisions to make and there’s always something to improve. I hope that the full version adds a few extra weird ways to increase the temperature and add oceans to the planets.
Plan B: Terraform does not have an impressive presentation. The planets themselves look pretty good but the buildings and cities lack detail or any interesting quirks. The bigger problem is that it can be hard to use the interface to quickly tweak aspects of the industrial chains. The sound design isn’t better, with a soundtrack that fits the theme but does not impress.
Conclusion
The core mechanics are massively inspired by Factorio and many other titles inspired by it. Plan B: Terraform does tweak the formula but it needs to innovate more if it wants to draw in players who love this genre and want to create and manage complex industrial chains.
A preview key was provided by the publisher.
