The Planetoid
is a freeware 2D Real-Time Strategy game developed by Metalsoul and hosted by YoYo Games.
The game features the Hominids, a race of creatures who move to a new planet after their home is destroyed by the Planetoid, a large green asteroid that destroys everything in its path. Meanwhile, the Aliens have decided that only they can be in that particular system, so they become the game's villains. The player's task is to help the Hominids to survive while colonizing planets and avoiding extraterrestrial threats.
The Planetoid became a popular game, and eventually developed into a series of three games and a spinoff in the form of Planetoid Defense. For the third game, Metalsoul decided not to do the rest of the game partway through, so he handed it off to Elmzran of TastyHamGames. Elmzran then made a Web site about the game, which you can visit here. Later, after the game stopped development, Gheiter made his own remake of Planetoid 3 with massively different mechanics, such as having to transfer resources to other planets due to each planet having a resource limit.
Metalsoul was working on Planetoid 3D, which was of course a fully 3D game and the first 3D game in the series, which was released as a paid product.
The Planetoid series provides examples of:
- Ascended Extra: The Zorguls, who didn't do much in the first game, became playable in Planetoid 2, the first game to have multiple playable races.
- Difficulty Levels: Easy, Medium, and Hard. Harder difficulties make the AI colonize faster. Hard starts you off in a blue giant system.
- Game-Breaking Bug: What many people call "The Freeze", the third game had a bug that would cause asteroid collisions to freeze the game. This was later fixed.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The Planetoid causes this if it collides with planets.
- Massive Race Selection: The third game had a large selection of races ranging from original races such as Hominids, the Aliens, and the Zorguls, to animal races such as Cats, Raccoons, and Foxes, to arbitrary races such as Jeans, TheAwesome, and XD.
- Not Playing Fair With Resources: Elmzran admitted that the AI controlled opponent has unlimited resources.
- One-Hit Kill: The Planetoid itself is this, to everything except stars.
- Shout-Out: Some of the races, including Darthcube and Pac-Man.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: In each of the three games, you can fling your people into space.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: Although many people believe the goal to be destroying the other species, what you want to do is up to you.
