Ashes Of The Singularity Is Near, Arrives On March 31st
Ray Kurzweil would be proud.
Ashes of the Singularity is aiming to walk in the footsteps of Total Annihilation. The thousands of enormous robot footprints of Total Annihilation, since it's an RTS about flinging hundreds of fighting machines at your enemies across each of its missions. There's a new trailer below which brings with it the game's release date, March 31st.
Ashes has been in early access for some time now, and our Mr. Zacny played it and spoke to the team back around its initial release. He was excited by its inspirations, which include elements of Company of Heroes and Kohan, but found that its iterations on standard RTS mechanics were small rather than the revolution its developers were promising in the wake of the game's 64-bit architecture. Our own Mr. Meer was slightly more positive but still had reservations, saying:
Only longer-term play will reveal whether Ashes manages the grand tension and master-planning of SupCom: right now I’m a little distracted by what’s different, and really need to get over that. But I am hugely enjoying having Ashes there on my screen, filling a nerdly need that’s been left unfulfilled for half a decade. I wish it had a bit more personality, though: I think Ashes is so determined to be like SupCom and simultaneously so afraid of being identical that it hasn’t quite managed to be aesthetically distinctive in its own right. But fingers crossed that wilder units and factions will show up later in development. With its single faction and handful of slightly plain maps, the current build does feel paradoxically a little small, but that’s definitely going to change – and hopefully improve – before too long.
Since then the game has gone through a number of updates, of course. January's release of beta 1 introduced a new faction, the Substrate, along with new maps, ranked multiplayer, and a leveling system for your units. Beta 2 in February brought still more maps and improved AI. We'll have a review of the game sometime around release to see if it lives up to the hopes.