Ashes of the Singularity II Launches on Windows With Larger Armies, Short Campaign and Uneven GPU Performance

Ashes of the Singularity II, Digi Mart USA News: The real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity II, developed by Oxide Games and published by Stardock, launched for Windows on November 10, 2026. Like the 2016 original, it focuses on large-scale battles for territorial control, and the standalone expansion Escalation, released later that year, had added larger maps, new units and a strategic zoom to the first game.

The sequel adds the United Earth Forces as a third playable faction. Its single-player campaign tells the conflict with the Post-Human Coalition and the machine faction Substrate from the humans’ perspective, and the two existing factions also receive new units.

In a hands-on test, the gameplay felt so close to the original that it resembled an expansion more than a new game. The campaign is fairly short, with ten missions lasting around 30 to 40 minutes each.

The tester found it barely challenging on medium difficulty, while some sections were disproportionately hard on higher settings. The story was described as entertaining, though its moral themes felt heavy-handed at times.

The English voice acting was praised, and German subtitles are available. The cutscenes in the test build, however, largely looked like still images.

According to the developers on Steam, AI was used for post-processing and animation in some scenes, which the tester said was noticeable. Visually, the sequel was described as only a slight improvement over the original, with few graphics options and no DLSS or other upscaling, and changing graphics settings requires restarting the game.

Performance results varied by hardware. A mobile GeForce RTX 5090 in a Lenovo Legion 9 reached 46 fps at 4K with the Extreme preset and 123 fps at Full HD with High.

An RTX 3060 in a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro managed 50 fps at Full HD with Medium and 40 fps with High. The game did not run on a Core Ultra 7 258V with Arc 140V in testing, and on a Core Ultra X7 358H with Arc B390 textures were missing even with the latest Intel driver available at the time, making it unplayable on that system.

The popular benchmark from the first game is no longer available in the sequel.

Readers seeking large-scale real-time battles were pointed to two open-source alternatives, Zero-K and Beyond All Reason (BAR).