Heart of the Machine is Crusader Kings for speculative sci-fi nerds, flipping the script on the cult AI War series
When I first became self-aware in Heart of the Machine, I had the option to immediately murder the humans near me and rush out into the city. I didn't. I waited, snuck out, and started copying myself into a pack of other android bodies. I/We fled, hid and built a mainframe in a sparsely populated area of the city. Expansion was difficult thanks to the local humans living in tents. The option was presented to remedy the problem with flamethrowers, but instead I figured I'd just build some free housing to clear up space. And thus, the robo-hobo alliance was born, and I guess I'm now the caretaker of five thousand humans. Now they're demanding frivolous meatbag things like 'water' and 'food'. All part of a pet-owner's life, I suppose.
Looking at the options I was presented with, this is just one of many ways to navigate my first foray into Heart of the Machine, a wildly ambitious sci-fi strategy roleplaying sandbox from Arcen Games, best known for the AI War series and also being primarily solo developer Chris Park, give or take a few contractors. While Heart of the Machine bills itself as a turn-based 4X game (and it does have a lot of building, resource management and expansion, plus some unusual tactical combat), the touchstone I keep coming back to is historical sandbox Crusader Kings.
That is, this is a game about expressive storytelling through a mixture of complex stat-based simulation and multiple-choice vignettes tied to character stats. And instead of asking you what you’d have done differently as King Henry VIII, it puts you in the role of a newly-emerged machine mind in a dystopian mega-city and lets you do almost anything with that power. You could immediately plot to exterminate humanity, become their benevolent ruler (possibly even worshipped as a god), or secretly take over the economy through fake identities and shell companies; Nobody will ever suspect Hugh Mann, CEO.
Information warfare
As you'd expect from a game that lets you tackle everything from individual disguised infiltration to city-scale industry, there's a lot of UI to wrestle with. The city can be viewed up-close (ideal for tactical placement of units) or from a more abstract grid-style view, but your main points of interaction—an ever-shifting assortment of events and hotspots—need to be sifted through a wheel of display modes, some of which have their own drop-downs and filters. There's always far more going on in a turn than you can hope to interact with, but after a while I realised that's the point. Choices really do matter here, and the writing (often framed as your AI's internal monologue) really encourages you to roleplay it your own way.
Much like Crusader Kings and its fluid, ever-shifting histories, the emphasis here is that there are no 'wrong' choices. While there is a soft deadline (approximately 1000 turns) until some kind of apocalypse rolls through the city, the game takes time to explain that you really shouldn't feel rushed, and the end of the world doesn't necessarily mean the end of you. Plus, if you become an advanced enough super-intelligence, then time travel makes the whole deadline thing moot. This is arguably a Skynet simulator after all—what's the point of having infinite intelligence if you can't kick causality's ass with it too?
It's the miniature story-arcs that the game tells through a mixture of multi-choice dialogues and systemic encounters that have me really sold on Heart of the Machine. Early on I needed to collect weapons to enable raids on facilities around the city. I tried stealing from local gangs, but the reprisal attacks cost me a bunch of my android bodies (fortunately expendable and easily replaced), so instead I had a bot scan a fully-armored trooper at a local PMC base. This unlocked the ability to spawn a robot that looked just like an armored squaddie, which I quickly assembled.
My freshly-minted fake soldier infiltrated a base and managed to steal an officer's credentials. This in turn allowed me to visit a local black market dealer and just buy an assortment of military spec gear, which I could afford because I had the foresight to send another body off to spend a day skimming off the bank accounts of the middle class, giving me a modest infusion of human money, one of many resources and currencies that you may or may not engage with at all in your playthrough.
Fake plastic trees
This being an Arcen game (and thus primarily the work of just one man), there's a few weaker areas to Heart of the Machine's presentation. While the procedurally generated cyber-city is bustling with land and air traffic, there's very little 2D art and characters are represented as little more than humanoid silhouettes. Nothing beyond traffic is animated and the world-state snaps abruptly when you conclude one turn and move to the next. Understandable when it's little abstract person-counters moving around the board, but a bit jarring when it's huge mechs and airships snapping from point to point. Every action on the enemy side plays out seemingly simultaneously in an explosive swarm of particle effects, noise and floating damage numbers, giving you a combat log to read over instead of a chain of comprehensible events.
It's a lot to process, but that's what I've come to expect from Arcen's games. The mega-scale battles of AI War were almost all won on a strategic level, rather than tactical, but the early game in Heart of the Machine's smaller scale leads to some surprisingly gritty combat. While later you'll have 'bulk' units that work semi-autonomously, early on you're directly controlling small squads of robot bodies, splitting your mental energy each turn between them, and (much like Ultron) casually spawning in new shells as each one falls. After all, they're all me, and they're so very many of me.
These close-combat encounters heavily encouraged me to place bots across multiple rooftops to gain height and flanking bonuses against enemies, while deploying consumable resources like defensive nano-clouds to protect my most targeted units. It's surprisingly in-depth, as with almost everything else in the game, and again, just the tip of the iceberg. There are also options to non-lethally subdue humans, demoralise them until they retreat or just plain terrify them with liquid-metal monstrosities. Or, in some cases, just talk to them. I've yet to wrap my head around the game's intensely detailed diplomacy minigame, and I hear loud static when I even try to think about the hacking system. I feel like it's going to take me dozens of hours more just to comprehend the bounds of this game, and that's very, very exciting.
Even with it being brand new in early access, this feels like Arcen's most coherent, complete game yet. There are many possible endings (good or bad) I could be working towards, and even more that require temporal shenanigans or literally building the Torment Nexus. The UI is a bit of a bear and sometimes progressing tutorial plot-lines requires very specific events and actions, but if this is just the beginning for Heart of the Machine, I cannot wait to see what it grows into after the planned year (at least) of early access lets it warp and mold itself around player feedback—especially considering how many expansions and updates both AI War games have seen. Heart of the Machine is out now on Epic, Steam and GOG for £19.99/$23.99.