Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy (RTS) game at an epic scale based in the far future.
What is Great about this game:
- Very strong RTS game mechanics with solid tactical and strategic elements
- An elegant combination of various other great RTS games (Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, etc) but still with an authentic flavor of its own
- Incredible replayability and playstyle variety - particularly in skirmish mode
- The unit management for such a large-scale game is second to none. Put units into an army, and they simply work smartly together. No micromanagement!
- Micromanagement is at a minimal level for a game of this scale. Armies are generally smart enough (assuming decent unit composition) to actually follow orders and execute on them relatively well
- The games visuals and tech are amazing. The Nitous engine (which is what this game runs on) is a beauty and looks so lovely that I switched graphics cards to run it better
What is Good about this game:
- Good unit variety with excellent hard counters (e.g. Apollo > Bomber > Zeus > Apollo across several different combinations of units etc)
- Dreadnoughts look and play amazingly - good depth and satisfaction to their upgrade tree, just fun to watch blow stuff up
- There is almost unlimited skill-ceiling even against the AI as the skirmish AI is quite excellent
- A good game of skirmish can feel epic and still be done in 30-60 minutes
What could be improved in this game:
- Some of the controls can be a little fiddly:
- Very large groups of units don't form armies entirely well (e.g. perpetually having the option to group into an army even after you just gave that command)
- If an army loses its "lead" unit (i.e. the biggest highest level unit), the army appears to forget all its orders and ungroups
- Sometimes giving simple capture node orders simply won't work, and you have to target either around the node or click many times which can be frustrating
- The dreadnaught upgrades can be a little tedious on very large maps. Would be nice if there was an icon in the GUI similar to the idle engineer icon to simply auto-find them and select them to upgrade faster with less hunting, even if you find them, can sometimes be hard to select the exact ship among a large group
- I wish the "tech"/quanta upgrade tree was deeper (i.e. more options than just more damage/more health - maybe faster movement, armor penetration, stronger fixed defenses, etc)
- The AI can be tough even at lower difficulties until you learn the game pretty well
- Would love more large skirmish maps
- The story and campaign are lacking, but that isn't why I play RTS games. As an aside, I also don't order salads at a steakhouse :)
Conclusion:
This is simply the best skirmish RTS game to come out probably since Supreme Commander. And even so, the devs are working on it constantly to improve on the game, and the progress continues to show. If you like RTS games, and particularly RTS games that focus on the skirmish mode or large-to-epic scale RTS games, this game is really second to none right now.
9.5 / 10.0
