Metacritic Game Reviews, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation for PC. Reviews- based on 31 Ratings. Would you like to write a review? Apr 08, 2016 Parents need to know that Ashes of the Singularity is a large scale, downloadable sci-fi themed real-time strategy game. Violence is non-stop in the game, with players tasked to build armies and face off against opposing forces in massive battles that could include hundreds of units at a time.
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was released last week after months in early access, promising huge Supreme Commander-style battles and furious tactical decision-making. But is it simply walking in the giant robot footsteps of its predecessors? Brendan tells us wot he thinks.One of the lines of Ashes’ marketing goes: “win the battle with strategy, not speed”.
I am here to tell you: that is nonsense. This is about as speed-clicky an RTS as you can get. There are parts of its design that will (theoretically) make you consider your approach more thoughtfully.
But make no mistake, this is as traditional as shepherd’s pie. Even an AI opponent on the Normal setting will be pumping out tens of actions every second, so have your murder tendons ready. You will need to be fast.Ashes has been pitching itself for the past year as a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. In many ways, it fits this description, and maybe too well.
As an artificial intelligence you are part of the Post-Human Coalition, fighting an enemy known as “splinters” – supposedly drones without autonomous thought. It’s a silly setup but it’s all that is really required. The game has a story mode called ‘Ascendancy Wars’ (more on this later), a skirmish mode against (other) AIs and the usual multiplayer options.There are also a few extra ‘scenarios’. King of the Hill is a defensive scrap for survival against waves and waves of increasingly difficult armies. Overlord is a 3 v 1 match up, pitting you and two lesser-brained robofriends against a nasty AI enemy with some of your unit options made unavailable.As far as the minute-to-minute war machine goes, all is present.
You capture waypoints blessed with metal or radioactive deposits, then plop down metal extractors or radioactive sucker-uppers to eat the material and add it to your income (later you can build an energy-enhancing construct on these waypoints to increase your uptake). Factories pump out small units – speedy scouts, rocket-launching “archers”, cheap “brutes”, medical repair bots and so on.Meanwhile, armories and sky factories add bombers, fighters, anti-aircraft tanks, powerful “sniper” units and wonderful, wonderful artillery. These latter tanks launch a gorgeous volley of rockets at enemies, even if they are out of sight. They can do this because the edge of the game’s “shroud” will glimmer with red if any enemy units are close to your own. Eventually you’ll be able to make tier 3 vehicles and “dreadnoughts” – huge capital floaters that can be upgraded the more they fight.This “upgrading” feature isn’t limited to the big guns, however. A third resource, called Quantum, can be supped from the earth with another building.
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This allows you to upgrade the health, firepower and radar range of your entire force, as well as increase the storage capacity for the other resources. It’s also a kind of battle cash you can use to summon orbital abilities – things like revealing terrain, unleashing a plasma storm, dropping an engineer or a squad of bots far from HQ.I was pleasantly surprised (miffed) when an enemy AI smashed my swarm of 25 bombers with a single blast of the destructive orbital strike, just as they were about to raid a little metal farm it had built. This AI went on to win the game by collecting enough Turinium – something gathered by holding power stations.
The other way it could have won is by flattening my central “nexus” – my home base. I got off easy.This all looks wonderful and seeing artillery shells arc through the sky isn’t the only time you’ll smile at the scale and grandeur of your army’s skirmishes. Queuing bots so that they march out of your factories to form unstoppable columns is just as interesting as it has always been. But this is the thing – it is just as interesting. Not more.Ashes is deep in the shadow of its great loves and entrenched in a way that makes it, well, sort of tired. There is nothing very novel about huge numbers of troops – we have been able to command such forces for decades. And while units like the Artemis artillery and the more advanced Dreadnoughts are fun to steamroll around with, some of the units are so bland they don’t even stand out against the snowy, cratered ground.
And they all look more or less the same, there’s very little distinct about the design or operation of each toy. Some vehicles of the Substrate (the second faction) are fun, like the dreadnought that looks like a giant brain in a pod. But most of them are identikit alien wobblecraft.You can highlight a bunch of troops and click a command to form an “army”.
This is one of the things the game emphasises. The idea behind composing armies is that each swarm will be the sum of its innards.
So an army with a lot of heavy, slow dreadnoughts will be slower but pack more punch. An army with a lot of scouts will see its overall speed increased, meaning it (theoretically) pays not to ignore the lightweight speedy guys, like you would in so many RTS games. But this “sum-of-its-parts” mechanic (the devs call them ‘meta-units’) is never really all that obvious. You can stack a battalion with medics and notice some survivability but apart from that I never really became consciously aware of any increase in speed or range.This might be because there was no viable way to measure any differences apart from making a purposefully distinct group. And in the heat of battle, you don’t have time to or resources to experiment. A lot of armies end up being such a mish-mash that you stop caring about composition and simply go for pushing hard with big numbers.
Getting the next batch of metal extractors is, as always, more important than tinkering with your troops.The most I thought about the make up of my forces was how best to complement ground troops with bombers, and how many fighters should come along for the ride. But how is this any different from the way you simply group things in other strategy games? In the end, it feels no different at all.I can forgive any RTS that holds tradition in high esteem but there are other things that irk me about Ashes.
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In the Ascendancy Wars – the story mode – there are 11 planets that make up the threads of a sci-fi tale. They swivel between being annoyingly hand-holdy and boot-to-the-balls debilitating. At first the desire seems to be to introduce the player to the different concepts one by one – ground units, resource capturing, the tech tree.
For the first three missions everything seems fine. Then the fourth mission shows up and punches you in the kidney. “This isn’t a tutorial,” it seems to say, “this is your gruesome death.”This infuriating mission tasks you with holding out against waves of various enemy units with very little in the way of available resources.
So far, so good. Then ten minutes into the mission, the tutor bot pops up and says: “oh yes, by the way, there are dozens of aircraft coming to blow you up. I guess you should have this.” At which point he grants you – at the very last minute – the option to build AA-guns and AA vehicles, none of which you can build fast enough because the airplanes are basically already on top of you, bombing your engineers to death.It is intensely frustrating to have to repeat what is essentially a tutorial mission half a dozen times. The result is a straitjacketing scene in which you have to wait for some videogame Clippy to pop up and bless you with an ability, one which you ALREADY KNOW, right from the start, is necessary to survive. I’ve seen a lot of players complain about the difficulty of this mission, so I know I’m not alone. It can be overcome, but it’s such a spike it makes your teeth grind.Compare this to, which also sought to revive the grand scale, spirit and pace of Total Annihilation and SupCom.
PA had its problems (it was a rushed and the devs sold a follow-up game by tweaking some things and then simply adding the sub-name ). But at least it approached the revival of its inspirations not only with a dash of originality, allowing you to invade and swarm over multiple, spherical planets, but also with a lot of its own visual character.It was just as tough-as-nails as this outing can be, but it brought so much more to the table. I can’t in good faith recommend Ashes when the true inheritor of Total Annihilation’s twisted and burnt crown already exists in the form of Uber Entertainment’s interplanetary wreck session.I’m making this sound worse than it is. For anyone yearning to see tanks flooding in and out of canyons in a way that brings them right back to 1997, you may well have what you want. But if the veil of nostalgia doesn’t tempt you, you’re not going to be convinced.Overall, Ashes isn’t bad, it’s just very plain. Gorgeous, but plain.
There’s nothing here that hasn’t been done before and done better. And I certainly don’t think it has the spark that made Company of Heroes so excellent, despite what the developer (even if you can make a “veteran” of your biggest tank). You can win the battle here with speed, and maybe a little strategy. But, being entirely honest, I wouldn’t recommend battling at all, in singleplayer at least.Ashes of the Singularity is available now. We’ll have a close look at the multiplayer side of the game next week.
Ashes of the Singularity, a new sci-fi real-time strategy (RTS) game, is set in the year 2178 wherein the human civilisation after having achieved has moved out into the galaxy. Now called Post-Humans, they have settled themselves on other planets but face a new threat from within: their own AI gone rogue, leading a force called the Substrate. But why is it turning on them?
That's where Ashes' problems originate. An unimaginative story based on a heavily overused trope (humans vs AI), led and narrated by characters who are never seen, communicate exclusively via text messages and have the personality of a toaster.It's quite bland, and unfortunately this lack of imagination carries itself over into the single-player campaign. The missions - there are only a dozen- don't connect with each other and there is no central protagonist to follow. It all feels a little too detached, like engaging yourself in an extended tutorial, without ever exploring if there is even a plot at its core.If you are able to ignore the absence of a well-thought story though, you will realise that the Ashes campaign is designed to ease you into the game mechanics. A single type of unit in any RTS - no matter how many - is no match for a group of units that fill in each other's weaknesses. That's true with Ashes too - instead of piling this all at the start, the game introduces units and scenarios as you go on.By doing this, it allows you to grasp the fundamentals of Ashes and not only understand how each unit functions on its own, but also the best way to use and pair them in battle. Ashes isn't concerned with clever micro-management though.
It's about forming huge armies while maintaining the right balance that lets you outnumber and outwit your enemy. Go soft on either size or strategy, and you'll find yourself wiped out from the battlefield. And the game wants you to do this on half a dozen fronts. The thing is, the game's units get slower as they get bigger and stronger. Add to that the humongous size of the maps, and you'll very quickly realise that if you aren't already present on one stage, you aren't going to get there in time to save the day.( Also see: )The game was part of Steam Early Access, but it feels unfinished even now, after release. For example, though the maps possess considerable variety in terms of terrain, there is a consistent lack of detail to the textures and it all ends up looking rather dull.The hovering space robots that are your units fare much better in comparison. Even from a full zoomed out perspective, the different types of units are distinguishable; and when you zoom in all the way, you can tell - more so on the highest detail setting - a lot of work has gone in to model the units.All of this can't make up for the half-baked campaign though, and the best way to enjoy Ashes ought to be its skirmish or multiplayer game modes.
There's a specially built tutorial for players who are only interested in these modes, and though the 45-minute mission won't delve into the intricacies, it should serve as a good enough starting point to jump into Post-Human versus Substrate battles.The game' focus on military action is a good thing, and the only resource cultivation is akin to that of Relic's Company of Heroes (CoH). To control a region, you must capture its corresponding power generator, which gives you access to the resources in its vicinity. As with munitions and fuel in Company of Heroes, Ashes gives you metal and radioactives which are required for most units.
You can even construct a small building to increase your output, just like CoH. You also need to make sure all the regions under your control are linked to each other, or they won't contribute to the economy. Things change a little beyond that, starting with off-the-map abilities.With CoH, war points earned through fighting give you access to higher powers, which then cut into your other resources upon activation. Ashes treats thing a little differently and linearly, putting the entire focus on a third variable termed 'Quanta' - harvested by specialised towers that you can build anywhere - which can then be used to upgrade the size and capabilities of our army, or to call down actions from the sky.But as is with CoH more or less, all these tasks are handled by the game's only civilian unit: the engineer.
Where the game differentiates itself is how it asks players to handle the two main resources: metal and radioactives. Both have a forced cap, and instead of letting you collect as much of the two as you like, Ashes is designed to be a continuously moving economy wherein you are always thinking about how to best spend what you have to build up your army. Either that, or it all goes to waste after a point.And to help you get better, the game will tell you via statistics at the end of a mission how well you managed to be consistently productive and not sit on your bottom, so to speak.Good, but no game-changerAshes is evidently inspired by the likes of Supreme Commander, Total Annihilation, and Company of Heroes, but fails to match up to their greatness, let alone spearhead a new direction.
It places more emphasis on the overall strategy rather than the individual on the battlefield - which for some is a good thing - and wants you to treat units as expendable forces. But for a game focusing on battles amongst huge armies, the limited number of units is startling.And while it's commendable that the team at Oxide Studios - with the help of DirectX 12 on Windows 10 - have engineered a RTS game that can manage thousands of units without bogging down the system (the one we used had a 4th-gen Core i7, Nvidia GTX 760 and 16GB RAM), technical achievements do not necessarily contribute to a greater gaming experience.For what it's worth, the AI is designed intelligently and adapts quite well. It is good at identifying your weaknesses and responding with a force that stresses on those points.
At the same time, it never makes you feel that you couldn't have averted the disaster and plugged in the holes, which is proof of a well-programmed difficulty curve. Outside of its lacklustre campaign, Ashes of the Singularity has the framework for thoroughly engaging matchups but the final product fails to land a convincing argument.Pros:. Strategy over reaction. Intelligent AICons:. Lacklustre campaign mode and story. Limited number of units. Drab environment designRating (out of 10): 6We played a review copy of Ashes of the Singularity on the PC.
The game is available on at Rs.
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