Picking Up Steam: Beware Planet Earth (PC)
Every now and then a game designer seems to view the passivity of the tower defense genre was a problem in need of solving. In many tower defense games, you lay out your towers to automatically attack incoming enemies with placement meant to be a test of your strategizing. A few items may exist that give you the means to more instantly or directly harm a foe, but they often come with a cost that means they must be saved either as a last resort or for specific advanced tactics. Beware Planet Earth wants you to be constantly involved in repelling the alien menace despite its tower defense design though, giving you a ray gun that does put some of your fate more directly under your control but also warps the format to make that little gun an all too important part of your success.
The Martian invasion of Earth has begun, and their first target are the cows that belong to the unfortunate rancher Barney. Right as the aliens arrive, Barney finds himself trapped in his outhouse, the protection of the livestock falling on you instead. Despite being trapped, Barney is a bit of a tinkerer, able to provide some useful equipment for protecting his herd from the extraterrestrial menace. The Martians, despite riding in their own personal flying saucers, must follows specific paths to reach the cow pasture, the player needing to build defenses in the open grass nearby to take down the aliens before they can grab the cows and make it back to the crop circles they arrived at.
The effort ends up taking place across an entire year, the different seasons bringing with them new concerns like winter slowly freezing your gear if you don’t warm them up or autumn arriving with some mushrooms that might crowd out building space if you don’t keep them under control. When it comes to what you’re making though, first you’ll need to set up some machines to build cogs, cogs being the resource needed to manufacture the defensive equipment. Cog factories needing their own spot can lead to some interesting considerations, some levels having out of the way spots as obvious places for them but others they may have to fill a spot that an attacking tower could have been placed in otherwise. Once the cog factories do start providing their resources though, you can start placing down your means of beating back the Martians. Kegs that automatically fire on anything in range, fridges that slow down their targets, a barbecue with explosive shots, and a poison spitter for gradual damage make up your more standard offensive tools that are unlocked over time, but there are some more situational options as well. A decoy cow and a watering can to help with overheated machines are more strategic inclusions than pure offense, but you can only bring so many towers into a level and some are hardly worth the effort. Before you even begin to consider the earlier mentioned ray gun though, there are also tools like acid mines and bombs that can be placed for nearly immediate damage if the aliens are proving too much for your current buildings, but no matter how well you build, almost every level will require frequent use of the Zapper.
The Zapper is a ray gun that follows your mouse wherever you point, and by holding down the left mouse button, you can start damaging whatever alien happens to be in your sights. You can also use this to briefly overload your towers that causes them to turn off from overheating afterwards, but primarily, it’s a means of dealing damage yourself to the invading extraterrestrial hordes, and it is one you cannot ignore. Most levels in Beware Planet Earth require frequent Zapper usage, something that becomes even more the case if you choose to play on the Veteran difficulty where aliens are more resilient and thus slower to kill. Almost any time you aren’t building or gathering cogs you should be zapping, but the ray gun comes with a notable drawback. Fire the Zapper for too long and it will overheat, the gun becoming unusable for so long that you can almost guarantee some cow kidnappings will happen in Veteran if you let your Zapper get to that point. Therefore, you must be constantly zapping, but not to the point the weapon is overloaded, making the process of wearing down aliens a bit tedious. You unload on them until the gun starts making the noise that indicates imminent issues, wait, then start zapping again, repeating this cycle fairly often. Because the Zapper is so important to making up for your towers often deliberately not being powerful enough to handle the aliens on their own in most levels, the game can’t put in something like a fast forward that would help you blast through the slower times where you can actually handle the aliens with just your towers.
Despite the clear importance of the Zapper, the level designs and the built-in issue with using the ray gun too much do mean there is still room for strategic building to still be a major focus of Beware Planet Earth. Different alien types exist that will necessitate broadening your strategy, fast moving ninja types easily able to zip past slower towers for example while some aliens can leap over parts of the map or even set up portals so others can follow them through to the other side. A bit unfortunately, many alien types also exist to give the Zapper more to do. Mad scientist Martians for example will create a forcefield around nearby aliens that can only be broken with zaps, stealthy aliens are invisible to towers before you shoot off their disguises, and the portals left behind by the portal making aliens can only be closed with some ray gun pressure. Beware Planet Earth feels like it is consistently on the precipice of being a bit too focused on the ray gun and yet that element is held back by the fact you can only use it in brief (albeit constant) spurts. Even the maid alien that doesn’t seem like she’d require Zapper use instead nudges you towards it more because she can vacuum up other instant forms of damage like the acid mines and bombs.
The ray gun is overdone rather than an inherently bad idea, but Beware Planet Earth does have some missions that mix things up to break away from the norm. Every season has some special missions where you are given a set amount of cogs as well as a limited range of towers, and while the Zapper may still play a part, these challenges are clearly about proper tower layout most of all. A mission focusing on the maid aliens for example would overheat the ray gun on its own, so you need to make smart use of your explosives to harm incoming aliens without having your resources vacuumed up. Fast moving ninjas come in droves in another level and only smart tower placement can handle the amount of them. As a bonus, the game even includes two sets of special stages, one themed around Halloween and another based on game properties belonging to Valve. Halloween introduces some new enemy types like ghosts that fade into and out of view while the Valve levels reskin familiar aliens to match recognizable characters like the Soldier from Team Fortress 2 or Gordon Freeman from Half-Life. While the Zapper will still be a frequent presence (it’s the main way to take out the ghosts for example), the extra stages do at least continue to provide decent lane layouts and tight building spaces so you are still making strategic considerations on tower placement between holding down the left mouse button.
THE VERDICT: Beware Planet Earth’s tower defense gameplay is decent but a bit unambitious, the towers, lane layouts, and aliens working well enough to provide levels that require some thought to overcome… at least until you factor in the Zapper. The little ray gun adds a layer of constant involvement yet comes with the drawback of it breaking down if used too much, but with levels designed around its constant use it goes from a tool to let you be more involved in taking out Martians to a bit of a nuisance. It doesn’t require much strategy to hold down the left mouse button and the gun’s presence clearly impacted how powerful individual towers were allowed to be, Beware Planet Earth not completely sacrificing tactical tower building but losing some of its focus in pursuing a rather plain form of active involvement.
And so, I give Beware Planet Earth for PC…
An OKAY rating. Beware Planet Earth has some nice touches, like the glass helmets of the aliens cracking more and more to show you how close they are to dying, and some nifty ideas like the cows needing time to walk back to the pasture can allow for flash points of action when one alien carrying a cow drops it and you need to protect the heifer until it’s home. The Zapper, despite being a crucial element, isn’t the only element required for success, a player still able to make satisfying arrangements of towers to defend the pasture that can sometimes even let you sit back and watch the automatic defenses do their work unassisted. Later levels and Veteran mode specifically require constant weapon usage though, and the ray gun ends up unsatisfying to use because it is both required and limited in its usage. It would be too powerful if you could use it with impunity, Barney teasing you with the idea of upgrading it to avoid overheating almost the entire game, but having to frequently let up on zapping Martians to wait just to do it again is a loop defined more by its drawbacks than its benefits. If the ray gun was something meant only as a bit of back up when needed it would be easier to stomach its restrictions or if it was only used for situations like popping forcefields and revealing the disguised aliens it could be a cute touch. Instead, Beware Planet Earth is a tower defense where holding down a mouse button with proper timing is just as important as considering which towers you’ll place and where, and the gun even likely lead to other ideas not making it in like there being no fast forward or any way to upgrade placed towers. Beware Planet Earth can whip out some interesting bonus levels and challenges despite it all, but the emphasis on the flawed Zapper holds back how strategic the play can be.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems I stopped playing Beware Planet Earth years back shortly after the Zapper is introduced, even its early levels starting to show how much of experience will be dominated by its necessary use. It’s thankfully not the true main focus, smart tower choices still what will deal with most of the Martian invasion, but the towers do maybe 80% of the work and your ray gun does 20%, and since that 20% is more than enough to mean the aliens can slip past and snatch all the cows, you can’t afford to slack on ray gun usage. Beware Planet Earth ends up almost too active, the zapping inoffensive in small doses but overdone to the point it defines your success despite it being so basic in concept.