This game recently came out of Early Access, and I decided to play it through to completion and do a video series on it. I actually bought the founder pack for this game during Early Access and my initial view on the game is positive, it's essentially a traditional tower defence game based in the Ashes of the Singularity universe (and uses the same game engine). It has an interesting Sci-Fi setting, story and high quality voice acting and the gameplay is enjoyable so far, to be honest I do love a good Tower Defence game. They bring back many fond memories, I used to play an online TD called "Xeno Tactic", and more recently a TD with an FPS twist called "Sanctum 2". It's always satisifying to see your turrets unleashing a storm of firepower on advancing enemy waves.
In a nutshell, if you are a fan of Tower Defence games, you will like this game, and honestly it's not expensive, on Steam here for £11.39 right now at the time of writing.
Thoughts on Initial performance
Anyway, it's just come out of Early Access, and right now it only has DX11 support, which was a bit of a concern to me at first. Since it's based on the Nitrous engine from Ashes, it does support DX12 but apparently there are some small issues to iron out, and the game does run well on DX11 (especially on weaker PCs that I am told), so if it works, it works.
Anyway performance is pretty good, I am able to get over 60 FPS a lot of the time, but in heavy combat scenes with lots of explosions I did see some dips below 30, and a considerable of time is spent below 60 as you will see in the video, in such scenes. It is CPU bound, as the GPU utilisation does drop a bit. But, due to the nature of this type of game; the relatively lower frame rate doesn't actually impact playability almost at all, at least for me. And that's what's matters, not some arbitrary FPS number.
I believe DX12 would help in these scenes, especially with draw-calls, but as the game is very young and just out of Early Access, you can't judge the final performance just yet. It will likely get many updates.
Without further ado, the Video!
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