Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

The biggest issue with this game is it controls like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, the screen scrolling is very slow (even cranked to 300%) and takes a second to register so simply moving the camera around feels like a huge chore, units will randomly spin in circles instead of attacking or become super slow when trying to move. The game was theoretically designed to not need much my micro by having your units micro themsleves but they move in such bewildering and useless ways that the game is frustrating to attempt to play. Furthermore the unit design is bland, they all look identical and not particularly interesting. For a game that prides itself on epic massive battles it is a very strange choice to make those battles so ugly by turning every unit into a nearly identical floating box. The whole thing just feels cheaply made, the voice acting is strange and poorly edited with characters occasionally saying grammatically incoherent sentences. The dialogue feels even more halting and stilted because there is a long pause after each character says a sentence before the next character will begin saying the next sentence. The whole game is tutorialized agonizingly, periodically forcing your camera to zoom to objectives while taking away all your control, but still leaving your units moving and the game running. This is even worse because you have to wait for the characters to tell you, slowly, exactly what the objective is that you can clearly see. Hillariously the first sentence or two of the intermission dialogues (the only place the actual story is delivered, there are no real cutscenes) are impossible to hear because you get a steam achievement after each mission and the game turns down all the voice volume, but not the music, when you get an achievement. Shoddy quality, boring campaign, truly painful controls.

NPC conversations always blocking the player from doing anything whilst still leaving the game going on without pausing in the campaigns, what a retarded design.

They removed Vulkan support.

This game is very buggy and somewhat clunky; the plot is bleak, and the narration is mediocre... BUT I still really enjoy this game. The gameplay reminds me of Supreme Commander but still has its unique features. Campaign missions, while simple on paper, turn out to be a real exercise for your brain, especially if you’re also playing it on Expert—here meant for true masochists, I’d say. So, the game is far from perfect, but I genuinely enjoy it!

Installed this to play co-op with a friend. We attempted to play several times, each time being disconnected and desynced from each other well into the match. Went online to find numerous complaints about the issue in the developers forums as well in Steam Discussions dating from just a month prior to playing the game to the month the game was released. Saw that almost universally, when the dev responded they would indicate they were aware of the issue and were working on a fix that would be released 'soon'. Then noticed that the same pattern existed for almost ALL of Stardock's multiplayer games. Gave up trying to play co-op. Decided to give the single player campaign a run to try to salvage the experience. Discovered the campaign is one of those 'heavily scripted/on rails' type deals where you are expected to play exactly as the game tells you to or you'll be at a severe disadvantage. In other words, don't waste time trying to build a base unless you are explicitly told to build a base, don't try to build economy unless that is what you were told to do. Otherwise whatever time/resources you spent on extraneous activities will end up meaning that when the scripted event the mission triggers hits you, despite the fact that your actions should have theoretically put you in a far better spot to handle them, you'll be overwhelmed. Saw that the developer had actually funded the publishing of a dead tree book that was suppose to be the first of a prequel trilogy to the game's storyline. Then noticed that someone had asked when the next two books would be coming out, only for the dev to respond that the author of the first book had become too expensive to hire to finish the series, so they were looking into other alternatives. Which seems to describe the entire setup. Ashes of the Singularity is full of promising ideas that were either poorly or half implemented. I can't recommend this to anyone but a hardcore collector of Sci-Fi based RTS games and then only to pad out your collection, god help you if you actually wanted to play it.

Decent RTS similar to Supreme Commander. There's a lot of content and I got it on sale for like $3 so definitely worth that price. Units feel a little unresponsive to me sometimes but maybe I'm just bade. Overall, I'm happy

ASSes of the singularity