Become a sentient AI in Heart of the Machine, the latest deep strategy game from Arcen Games (AI War 1/2, The Last Federation, Bionic Dues) and it's now in Early Access. I've been running it on Desktop Linux (Kubuntu 24.10) with Proton 9.0-4 and it's been running very nicely. Note: key provided by the publisher.
What exactly is it? A game that unusually blends many different genres together. Mostly fits in within the strategy genre but there's a blend of RPG mechanics, city-building and more with a lot of options and progression systems that make it one of the most unique experiences you can find right now. Everything depends on the decisions you make, what goals you're trying to achieve and it's just thoroughly different.
Even the setup here before you get into the game had me raising eyebrows with a little excitement, with the background lore and how it mentions that the city itself is both your enemy and your canvas. With the rise of all this AI nonsense in the real world, it really feels like a fitting what-if experience.
Check out the release trailer:
Direct Link
It's quite a complicated game to get into but thankfully there's a little Prologue to get you going that will teach you the basics. Not a whole lot though mind you and the game pretty rapidly spreads in more and more features that it can be quite easy to get a bit overwhelmed by it.
The game really asks: what kind of AI will you be? And even from the get-go, you know it's going to be good when it gives you multiple options on how to proceed after your awakening and some of those come with multiple possible outcomes. I went a murderous route which, uh — didn't exactly go particularly well. Good job I'm an AI and can just keep spreading myself around to various Androids.
This is not a real-time game but turn-based, so you get plenty of time to weigh up all your options, which you'll be doing constantly as you try to get a feel for what you want to do. And reading, lots and lots of tooltip reading. There's so much information it will make your head spin.
I have a feeling that much like when Stellaris first came on the scene, Heart of the Machine is going to take over my life while I try various different things and attempt to mess with the city and find out all the mysteries. Can't wait to see this continue to expand during Early Access (which they said should be around 12 months long). This is a real love-letter to science fiction and I couldn't be more pleased.
Don't let the Early Access tag fool you though, this is already packed full of content, they just plan to continue to add a whole lot more possibilities as time goes on.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
pleasereadthemanual a day ago
The reason was because the Unity engine was deficient at writing Vulkan calls for Linux, and these bugs/missing features in the engine weren't fixable by the developer. DXVK did a better job of writing Vulkan calls than Unity, resulting in better performance and fewer bugs.
This is pretty embarrassing for a commercial game engine, but it does go to show how far Windows➜Linux translation has come...
I didn't think much of it in 2023, but this game sounds like a fun time. It's not a genre I'd normally enjoy, but it seems charming. I think I'll wait for a sale and a full release though!
(The dev is also quite friendly and open about stuff, and when I needed some Linux support with AI War 2 he quickly made a Vulkan build, tested and fixed some stuff, really nice support.)
But I also saw a youtuber (DasTactic) play some of it from an early version, and it looked particularly interesting. It won't be an instant buy simply because I have an awful lot of new games to play right now, but I'll definitely be trying it.
Last edited by eldaking on 5 Feb 2025 at 2:52 pm UTC
For The Last Federation, it really is nebulous because you just get a bunch of statistics about planets and factions, very abstract and indirect. It has been quite some time since I played, but IIRC I didn't go for much personal strength, more for strong allies (usually starting with the easy/benevolent ones and strengthening them) that could weaken or conquer others... but I had lots of scares when some enemy started getting too strong and I had to address it in a panic. I think going by how many planets you have under solid control is a good metric, though not that useful early on. I think I kind of avoided combat a bit because of how weird the "turn based bullet hell" was, instead I kept working on the planets to boost/sabotage factions) a lot.
Having 16 hours of entertainment for free is good, but some people would be shocked at the idea of having a 8 or even 4 hour tutorial. I would say that it was long because I was engaged and interested: I read everything, pondered at things, calculated my moves and not because I was held hostage by the game with it's drip feed of information about WASD controls for 16 hours (as sometimes happens in this day and age)
So, naturally, I would advise anyone to try the demo, where every core game mechanics are covered and then decide about buying. It's a very unusual game, very experimental in the good sense. There's something from AI WAR, Syndicate, 4X games and RPG indeed. One android went on a mission to steal money, while the other went to study cats (of all things), I was busy building water treatment infrastructure and orchestrating a military operation with air support to steal toilet paper from a warehouse. Sounds insane? Yes, frankly, when spelled like that, but it was fun and unusual and engaging. That's extremely rare in my experience.
Play the demo!
Last edited by vox on 6 Feb 2025 at 9:23 pm UTC
(Although I have tried a couple playthroughs of Civilization V as England with the express idea of starting wars as soon as I have longbows, defined in the game as "Long range light artillery that don't need setup!" It's just fun to besiege helpless enemy cities from outside their range.)
Maybe I'll try The Last Federation again. I actually rather liked the weird combat.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 6 Feb 2025 at 11:56 pm UTC
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