Planet Killer: every shot carves a crater that stays, and the planet shoots back

The pleasure of digging a hole in something is probably the oldest in video games, and also the worst served: in most games, destruction is an animation.

Planet Killer takes the opposite line with one simple rule: every shot leaves a permanent mark.

The principle

You are a planet killer. You seek out hostile worlds and reduce them to ash.

Planets are simulated pixel by pixel, which means your weapons genuinely carve into matter. You cut out huge craters, trigger shockwaves, and above all chain reactions: one explosion sets off another, terrain fractures, defences collapse along with the ground holding them up.

The game sums it up in a line I find apt: worlds crumble beneath sustained bombardment. This is a game you do not win in one blow, you erode.

What stops it being a sandbox

Planets fight back, and increasingly well.

Surface cannons, missile batteries, countermeasures. The further you get into a run, the more dangerous the worlds become, with elite variants, storm worlds and bosses.

Against that, you stack weapon modules: missiles, cannons, lasers, rapid-fire barrages, experimental weapons, plus defensive and utility modules. You adapt your build to the defences you meet, buy from a galactic shop between worlds, and die permanently when it goes wrong.

It is roguelite structure applied to a physical idea, and it works because the terrain keeps a record of your mistakes. A badly placed crater is cover for the battery you were trying to reach.

What makes you start again

Two things.

Procedural planet generation is more careful than expected: cities, surface features, cloud and storm systems, continents, islands, oceans. Even the background of space changes, with its star fields, nebulae and galaxies. You never bombard the same ball twice.

And there are 128 starting ships to unlock, each with strengths and weaknesses. That is a figure that smells of marketing, and I will be blunt: somebody needs to check they are genuinely different rather than 128 variations on three archetypes. It is the first thing I will be watching over time.

The game adds leaderboards and a ranking system with an emblem and a title, which points clearly towards score chasing.

What to know

The game launches today, developed and published by Talisman One Studio, with no reviews yet and no price shown as I write.

It is single-player, playable at your own pace, with no imposed real-time pressure and save anytime.

My reservation is a genre one: a destruction game lives on sensation, and sensation wears out. Everything will depend on the depth of the weapon combinations and on whether planetary defences force a genuine change of strategy rather than a simple power adjustment. A demo exists and it is the best way to find out whether the first crater feels like the hundredth.

How many continents did your best chain reaction take out? We compare catastrophes on the InsertCoins Discord.