Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation gets replay feature and three new maps

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation—a game about carefully lining up thousands of robotic units and then smashing them together in an explosion tiny lasers—has been given a massive update.

It was released last November as an expansion to Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity, which was a solid RTS, and the two were rolled into a single package earlier this year. Yesterday, the developers released an update that matches up to the game's grand scale: as well as being packed-full of much needed bug fixes and UI improvements, the 2.2 patch adds three new maps and a host of new features.

Chief among them is the new replay feature, which players have been demanding for a while. You can watch the footage from any game you've played to work out where you went wrong (or just relive the glory of stomping on your opponent), as well as watch videos of the top players to pick up some tips.

The new maps in the update are: Manannan, a 12-player Terran map aimed at free-for-all games; Brighid, an eight-player Arctic map to be played in two teams of four; and Aenghus, a ten-player desert map that is again aimed at the free-for-all mode. The maps were one of the weakest aspects of the original game, so let's hope these three are better.

And if that wasn't enough, the update introduces mod support, allowing fans to tweak game files, create maps and dream up new scenarios to do battle in. We eagerly await the results.

There are literally hundreds of other changes under the hood, most of which change the way that individual ships handle. It's a dizzying amount of detail that is bound to change the way you play, so if you're interested head over to the forum and read the post from Derek Paxton, Stardock’s Vice President of Entertainment.

If you want to try the game for the first time, this update provides the perfect excuse. It's on Steam for £29.99/$39.99.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.