Planetary Vanguard — A four-world combat run across the solar system

What is Planetary Vanguard — A four-world combat run across the solar system

Planetary Vanguard puts you on a rover that never stops. It rolls right on its own and the only thing you control is how fast: full throttle reaches 245 pixels a second, the brake drops you to 64, and letting go settles at a 165 cruise. Every world holds 21 sectors, and each asks the same three things. Gather the cyan cores along the route, destroy the generator pylons holding the mid-sector gate shut, and reach the beacon alive. Six checkpoints, A to F, mark progress and patch a little hull.

Two guns hang off the chassis, each for a different job. The cannon fires flat, level with the rover's deck, so it hits crawlers, turrets, rocks and pylons but sails harmlessly under a hovering drone. The anti-air gun fires straight up and is the only answer to drones and their bombs. Every fifth sector, and the twenty-first, puts a Warden in the way: an armoured machine that backs away ahead of you and opens its core for barely two seconds at a time. Scrap survives your death and buys upgrades in the hangar.

How to play

1. Pick a world and press Deploy. The rover drives right by itself; hold right for full throttle and left to brake down to a crawl before trouble.
2. Jump with Space, W, the up arrow or the JMP pad, and keep it held: holding it lifts the hop from 99 pixels to 180, the difference between clearing a pit and not.
3. Fire the cannon forward with Z or J and the anti-air gun upward with X or K. Only the upward gun reaches the drones hovering above the ground.
4. Collect the cyan cores counted at the top, shoot the pylons to open the mid-sector gate, then cross the exit beacon to bank the sector.

Strategies that work

• Take a pit at full throttle, never braked. With stock gear a held jump rises 180 pixels and stays up 1.15 seconds, which carries 282 pixels at a speed of 245; the widest pit in the game is 200. At cruise you cover only 190 and braked just 74, so the brake is for rocks and enemies, never for gaps.
• A Warden is only worth shooting for 2.2 seconds out of every 5.2. While its core is lit your shots do triple damage; the rest of the cycle they do about a third of normal. Watch the core rather than the health bar and expect the fight to come in bursts.
• Drones hover 155 to 215 pixels up and the cannon fires level with the deck, so it passes under them every time. Only the upward gun reaches them, on its own 0.3-second cooldown, so hold both triggers at once. The bombs they drop kill outright where they land.
• Hull protects you from nothing in three cases: a rock, a hopper already in the air, and a rolling boulder all destroy the rover on contact whatever the bar reads. All three die to one base cannon shot, so simply hold fire the whole way. A boulder wakes 560 pixels ahead.
• Rank S allows at most 12 damage taken, so one pit fall at 30 hull ends it immediately. Speed pays 8 points per second under par on top of the flat 800 clear bonus, while a core is worth 300 and a checkpoint 200: skipping a checkpoint to save two seconds is always a loss.

A little history

Planetary Vanguard was written for this site and has no older ancestor. It belongs to the auto-running platform shooter family, where forward motion is fixed and the decisions are about speed, height and timing rather than direction. The twist is the gate economy: a sector will not let you leave until you hold enough cores, so raw speed is never the whole answer. The four worlds use real planetary nomenclature: Mare Imbrium, Tycho and the Montes Apenninus on the Moon, Acidalia Planitia and Valles Marineris on Mars, Maat Mons and the tessera highlands on Venus, Caloris Planitia, Discovery Rupes and the hollows on Mercury.

Frequently asked questions