At the recent M3 version of the MacBook Pro press conference, Apple used "Planet: Reboot", a highly immersive post-apocalyptic survival game, to demonstrate, which made many fans who want to play games on Mac addicted. However, after the official opening of the game, only the iPhone version is available, and the Mac platform has not been launched yet.
More than a month has passed, and the official has now officially launched a new expansion pack "Ember Forever", which not only updates a lot of game content, but also makes it appear on the Mac App Store in China for the first time, becoming a 3A masterpiece of data exchange between Mac and iOS.
First of all, a brief introduction to this game, the story of "Planet: Reboot" is set in the apocalypse of an alien creature, the player, as a survivor, needs to rely on his own strength, collect resources in this world, and challenge alien forces, but before all this, we have one more important thing - to live.
The game character will be hungry, thirsty and other physical conditions, players need to collect or make food for the character during the adventure to ensure the character's survival. Note that water sources in the wild cannot be drunk casually, and if they are polluted, it may also lead to a decrease in health, which will also go die.
Because of this, this game has a complete crafting system, and the materials collected can be crafted into all kinds of potions, tools, food, etc., without wasting them. But what should I do if more and more materials are collected and crafted products, but the player's backpack space is limited?
Players familiar with the post-apocalyptic survival genre will know that Planet: Reboot has a well-developed home system where players can craft and place all kinds of furniture, production equipment, and of course, warehouses.
In the game, players need to slowly build their own homes, and at the same time make **, equipment, from bare hands to fully armed, to make themselves stronger and stronger. I've been playing this game on my iPhone before, and when I put out furniture, it's always not so easy to operate through touch, but now it's much more comfortable to use a keyboard and mouse on a Mac, and a variety of shortcut keys combined with the stable positioning of the mouse have improved the efficiency of building a home.
There is also a mecha system in the game that has to be mentioned, they have their own attributes and skills, such as the "Shadow Embers" that I have used the most recently, which is an assassin with two knives in his hand, strong mobility to flexibly shuttle between enemies, coupled with the refreshment of cold weapon melee combat, the physical buttons of the keyboard and mouse are more impactful, and it is much more comfortable than "rubbing glass" on the mobile phone screen.
In the new version, a brand new map has been opened - Kepler Harbor, a region with seaside beaches, space bases, and volcanic lava.
For long journeys, Planet: Reboot also offers a vehicle system where you can craft all kinds of motorcycles, race cars, flying machines, and in the new event, you can also get the "Star Snow Festival"-exclusive reindeer car, and the festive atmosphere is full.
In the game, after entering the new map, you can go from Kepler Airport to NASA and further on, you can see the grand scene of the volcanic eruption. It's no exaggeration to say that when I first entered the volcanic area, I was really blown away by such realistic scenes, the graphics of this game are worthy of the triple-A level, the volcano not only has flowing magma, but also erupts from time to time, with full-screen light and shadow, sound effects, full of immersion - I am already looking forward to playing this game on Vision Pro in the future, it is really cool.
Speaking of sound effects, Planet: Reboot also supports spatial audio technology, and it is highly recommended that you turn it on in the settings and wear your AirPods to experience it. It reproduces real-world ambient sounds, such as whirring winds, enemy footsteps, distant explosions, ......It all changes with our perspective on the game, and the sound is as real as if we were in the game world.
In the past few days of gaming, I have spent a lot of time wandering around the large world map, and the immersion brought by spatial audio has made me enjoy such a leisurely time more and more, especially the sea of blue flowers in the Duga River Valley, watching such a beautiful scenery, coupled with the insects and birds chirping around my ears, it is really comfortable.
Maybe you have to say, no matter how good the picture of the game is, no matter how real the light and shadow effects are, if the hardware configuration can't keep up, you can't play three steps and one card!Indeed, if the game can run smoothly, everyone will be willing to continue playing, so what are the configuration requirements for "Planet: Reboot"?
When the M3 series MacBook Pro was released, we had already tested its fluency, but at that time, we were using the M3 Ultra version, which represents the strongest strength of the current Mac, and there is naturally no pressure to run at 60fps full frame, and what everyone cares about is whether those models with relatively old configurations can run smoothly.
For this reason, I specially prepared a Mac Mini with an M1 chip, and it is a basic version with 8GB of RAM, which always speaks for itself.
All of my tests were done with this Mac, as did the recording shown above. You can pay attention to the frame rate in the upper right corner, and it runs at 60fps full frame for almost the whole time, and you don't feel the lag at all, and the game experience is smooth enough.
On the M1 model, this smoothness is achieved in large part because Planet: Reboot supports MetalFX Upscaling technology on Mac, which simply means that macOS can render lower resolution images in games, and then dynamically generate high-quality, high-resolution images through Spatial Upscaling and Temporal AA anti-aliasing.
This makes it possible to achieve a refined picture while maintaining a smooth frame rate, which is a significant advantage in the case of very heavy rendering tasks. At the same time, the characters and scene details in the picture will become better, and the texture of objects and light and shadow effects can be improved to ensure the quality of the picture.
Not only Planet: Reboot, but also big games on Mac such as No Man's Sky and Resident Evil will support the technology, and players are in for a treat.
In the latest macOS Sonoma, there is also a "Game Mode", in which the system actively calls up hardware and software resources and uses them in the foreground game to ensure sufficient smoothness. Users don't need to do any settings, as long as they run a full-screen game, the system will automatically enable, and they don't need to go back to "Balanced Mode" in the system settings to reduce energy consumption, which is very convenient.
Planet: Reboot also supports controller mode, after connecting to a Mac via USB or Bluetooth, it will automatically prompt whether to switch to the controller operation, and you can switch it with one click without entering the settings item. I experienced it with a controller, and it was no problem to run maps, collect, build, etc., but it was not as flexible as a mouse when shooting and aiming.
This is also because I usually use my iPhone to play games, and I am still not used to using keyboard and mouse and touch controls, so if you are a console gamer, you don't have to worry about it. However, it will definitely be more cool to play racing and fighting games with a controller, after all, with Apple's appeal, there will definitely be more and more masterpieces on the Mac platform in the future - "Planet: Reboot" is a good start for Mac's native games, it makes good use of Mac's software and hardware advantages, gameplay and graphics are on par with console-level triple-A games, the content we experience today is only a small part of the game, in Kepler Harbour, there are more game content waiting for everyone!