Planet 2000

Ever since the invention online multiplayer, game developers have struggled with how to handle the customary single-player mode. For some games, the solution is to create a short campaign that, if we're being completely honest, most of the fan base completely ignores. Unfortunately, that's often the best case scenario, as many online-focused games will do little more than repurpose the multiplayer stages and add bots.

On first inspection, that seems to be the case with Planet 2000, the brand new PlayStation 4 title from Triskelia Games. It's a fast-paced car combat game where the goal is to take land and destroy the other team's base. It has the type of single-player mode you would expect from online-focused action games; the kind where the so-called campaign is nothing but an afterthought. But here's the thing: This isn't an online game. In fact, the game doesn't even support anything beyond two-person splitscreen. And that's hardly the worst thing about Planet 2000.

This is a surprisingly easy game to describe, since every level plays out exactly the same way. As I already mentioned, the mission is to destroy your opponent's base. You do this by seizing land and building computer-controlled drones. Of course, your opponent is doing the same thing, so the battles always come down to a fight over a few centrally-located bases. Once you have enough land, you can start lobbing missiles at the base and blow it up into a million little pieces.

Instead of being just another first-person shooter, Planet 2000 has you tearing up the incredibly flat landscape with a couple different hover vehicles. You start out with a speedy craft that has built-in turbo boosts and can quickly race to each outpost. However, you'll want to take the slower, more powerful tank when going into battle. This slow-moving craft trades turbo-boost for a force field, which makes it a formidable foe on the battlefield.

Although painfully simplistic, this is a solid foundation for an online multiplayer action game. I mean, we've seen a lot of these concepts before, but never underestimate the amount of fun you can have playing with a bunch of friends shooting at each other. Except none of that fun is anywhere to be found in Planet 2000, where every mission feels like a lonely exercise in repetition.

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The large levels that should be filled with human players are all lifeless and dull. You'll spend way too much time just driving to each location after you die, knowing that all this busywork is adding minutes to the clock. It's not so much that the mechanics in Planet 2000 are bad, but rather that there's a general sense of sameness and monotony to every stage, and that going up against a predictable computer opponent isn't all that compelling.

It doesn't help that the hovercrafts aren't much fun to drive. I went in expecting them to float around the stages like a Covenant Ghost in Halo, but they handle more like Jill Valentine in Resident Evil. We zip around the screen using sluggish tank controls, which is only made worse by the inadequate strafe buttons. Even if you're piloting the faster craft, it's still impossible to escape enemy fire and becomes more about grabbing power-ups and hoping for the best. It's almost as if these vehicles weren't designed with combat in mind.

Ironically, one of the best parts of Planet 2000 is also its worst. Instead of giving us the typical wall of text, Triskelia Games went one step farther by including a full-motion video sequence before every stage. Of course, when I say full-motion video scenes, I actually mean that it's footage of actors standing in front of an unconvincing green screen. And when I say actors, I actually mean a cast made up entirely of adult film stars.

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Look, I have nothing against porn actors wanting to make the leap to video games. In fact, there have already been great of examples of this working out. But part of casting is giving us actors who not just look the part, but also act the part. And there isn't a single moment where I believed these three women are the top soldiers in an outer space war. It's not just the tongue rings and stripper nails, but how they spend the entire time looking away from the camera as they read cue cards. It's bad.

What I will say is that at least these full-motion video cinemas are occasionally funny, even though that's not what it's going for. The rest of the game is kind of a slog, where you end up doing the same thing from one map to the next and waiting for the computer opponents to step up their game. It also doesn't look especially sharp, with wildly outdated visuals and boring backgrounds.

But even if it had Oscar-winning actors, mind-blowing graphics and great gameplay, Planet 2000 would still be a single-player action game trying to mimic online shooters. Without proper multiplayer, there's almost no point in playing the game. The computer opponent is weak, the story isn't especially riveting and every mission plays out exactly the same way. And that's on top of so many other issues. If this is what we have to look forward to in space, then I think I'm better off sticking to planet Earth.