Ashes of the Singularity is a grand scale Real Time Strategy game that will eat your hardware like a great white shark eats a seal, but is this a great RTS game or a glorified benchmark program? I'm more leaning towards a benchmark program. Grand scale RTS games started with now classic Total Annihilation from 1997, it's spiritual successor Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander 2. There was a shortage of that type of strategy games until this game came along.
I got to be honest here, at the first glance Ashes seemed not too deep, but with this expansion, the game received some nice new additions and some new units. It is playable now, but it is not quite as great as good old classics are. The game has a story that is simple and boring at best, and only two playable factions seriously reduces the longevity of the game.
I still miss the great super units TA and Supreme Commander games had that could destroy a whole army and look cool while doing it. In this game we have some boring basic designs of units, there is nothing that really stands out like from those previous games mentioned. Dreadnoughts are big units that can pack a punch, but there is nothing that is making me go "Wow, that unit is cool, I want more of those". RTS games need to give that "Oh! I finally have this super unit, time to wreck shit up". In this game you can build dreadnoughts 5 minutes into the game, a serious design flaw. In addition to that when I compare an economy aspect and base building of the previous games mentioned, again Singularity lags behind.
Developers of Ashes of the Singularity focused more on the looks of the game. DirectX 12 was the main selling point of this game, and this was a game that was selling windows 10, but a harsh reality today is that nobody plays DirectX 12 games, I still play every game on DX 11. Nobody talks about this game today, I guess you can draw a conclusion from that. DX 12 was nothing but a marketing tool to buy Windows 10, and this game was one of the leaders for the whole movement.
It is a poorly designed RTS game with only decent graphics, I would even argue that 10 year old Forged Alliance looks better than this. In the end this is a very uninspiring RTS worth skipping. Score: 73/100