Ashes of the Singularity Reviews
Once you break free from the tactics-focused mindset of most RTS games, Ashes of the Singularity is a challenging, engrossing, and cerebral exercise in strategy that has me mentally iterating on army compositions, build timings, and board deployment schemes even when I’m not playing it. The campaign comes across as an unwanted stepchild beside the strong multiplayer, and the terrain art is dull and uninspired, yet Oxide has delivered on the promise of bringing back capital-S Strategy to the RTS space. This is a warzone where the shrewd general looking at the bigger picture will triumph over the fast-thinking ace with lightning hotkeys.
Ashes of the Singularity delivers thoughtful real-time strategy with tons of units in play, but drab maps and a poor story.
Plays things too safe and generic, relying on classic sensibilities and only bringing massive unit battles to the forefront. With little room to excel via micromanagement, conflicts devolve into blobs of of units blindly barraging each other
Ashes of the Singularity is a big and bold 4X strategy game, but if you’re looking for much beyond scale, you’ll be sorely disappointed.
Ashes of the Singularity appears at first glance to be a heavily graphically enhanced carbon copy of Supreme Commander, but functions very differently and honestly feels stripped down.
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.
Ashes of the Singularity is a beautiful game, but that's sadly the best that can be said. It's just shallow. It will offer some enjoyment, but the game just doesn't hit what it wants to be and stumbles too much along the way with even the basics, even punishing you for doing what the developers tell you to do.
I found the campaign to be very lacklustre and it didn’t hold my attention for long.
As it is now, Ashes of the Singularity is a solid RTS game that will only get better with age. The game delivers large scale battles but falls a bit short in the personality department.
Fans of Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation will lap up the similarities, but Ashes of the Singularity is far more than a clone. When you take all of this into consideration and add unsurpassed scale to the mix, you’re definitely onto a winner.
Ashes of the Singularity may be a technical triumph, but it also delivers an experience we’ve not seen in this genre for at least a decade. The single player may lack a bit of personality, but the skirmish mode and seven AI levels take RTS to the next level.
Ashes of the Singularity has limited depth in some aspects, but as an RTS experience, and particularly as a first showing for its Oxide Engine foundation, it is absolutely stellar.
Ashes of the Singularity is truly a mixed bag of RTS goodies. Its strategy tactics and large scale battles draw you in but the lack of unit variety and drab campaign really keep from engaging you. Though a fun past-time for new players, strategy veterans may not find much lasting appeal.
Ashes of the Singularity is a good entry into the RTS genre. It has solid building blocks to grow into something even better over time with more content or mod support.
While Oxide wasn’t involved in the making of Supreme Commander or its predecessor Total Annihilation, it’s clear that that’s what they’re aiming for and if you want thousands of units on a sweeping board, Ashes of the Singularity will serve you well.
It’s technically impressive, and it’s a well executed Total Annihilation /Supreme Commander clone, but it could have been much more. Its core gameplay is well-done and it’s technically impressive, but that’s about all there is to say about it. It’s a good game, but fails to be anything spectacular.
I mean, it's not actually painful to play. It's a little broken here and there, with one of those perma-map-scrolling bugs that seem to plague RTSes, and a couple of other small niggling technical issues. But what really stands out is the lack of anything interesting or novel. In the rush to market for the accolade of 'First game to utilise DirectX 12' or whatever, they've presumably cut everything out of the game that would have made it stand out from anything else. I guess there is a system of supply lines that can be cut which plays far more of a part in multiplayer games than it does in the single player campaign, but ultimately it's too little to make a difference. This is how we are to be introduced to DirectX 12 - not with a bang, but with a whimper.
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.
Ashes of the Singularity captures the massive scale of war with its impressive mix of gameplay systems, not to mention the tremendous replay value. The downside is that, despite graduating from Early Access, it's obvious that there is much more tweaking and updating to go.