ASHES OF THE SINGULARITY
STRATEGY ON AN EPIC SCALE BUT LITTLE ELSE.
Stardock’s new RTS clearly sees itself as a phoenix for SupCom and the genre in general. For the most part, it succeeds in spreading its wings, tossing out the speedy tactics of StarCraft II in favour of a more determined, thoughtful approach, while carpeting the playing eld with thousands of ghter planes, hovering battleships and tanks. It’s an RTS for pensive folks interested in the big picture.
Too bad it doesn’t spin a yarn worthy of it. Ashes devotes a mere missions to telling the tale of the Ascension War between the technologically augmented Post-Humans and the strange AI faction, the Substrate.
Victory rarely involves more than nabbing more resources than the other team. It’s all about piling hundreds or even thousands of ships on the screen at once, ranging from flying bombers and small skittering craft to lumbering dreadnoughts.
I played with DirectX support enabled, and my GeForce GTX had few problems running the camera over the busiest battles. It ran well when I zoomed in close enough to see the nicks on my ship’s hulls. It ran well when I pulled back to watch the symphony of destruction from afar, although it never quite reaches SupCom distances. The catch? I could only achieve an average fps.
It rarely seemed to matter, since dealing with that many units on screen demands a shift from the speed-based strategies common to Ashes’ few contemporaries. Appropriately for its title, Ashes champions a slow burn. I started enjoying it when I learned to think how it wants me to think; sending o dreadnoughts and small accompanying forces to points they wouldn’t reach for ve minutes, while I scoped out new deposits of resources with smaller, faster groups. Elsewhere, I shook o my initial disappointment with the samey look of units once I realised I fared much better using a hotkey to treat a collection of them as one entity, a ‘meta unit’.
Ashes’ true soul lies in skirmish mode. Centred on a mad rush for resources, it’s dazzlingly customisable and playable by up to six AI teams or players. Rather than bothering with endless micromanagement, I focused on the flanking, surprise flashes for Turinium and the carefully timed arrival of a dreadnought. In the process, I had more fun with an RTS than I have in a couple of years.
The drab maps rob it of an extra layer of strategy. I frowned at the forgettable campaign, but in other moments, Ashes rose beyond its lacklustre parts to deliver carefully paced victories I won’t soon forget.