It is my pleasure to belatedly announce AI War 2’s Early Access Release. AI War 2 was on Steam Early Access, on Monday this week. The slight advantage to a late announcement is that I get to tell you about the players and the developers’ initial reactions. Less than 48 hours after AI War 2 became available on Steam, and there are already 48 positive reviews for the game. This isn’t a huge amount of reviews certainly, and most of these reviews belong to Arcens (well deserved) pre-existing fan base. However, this is still a healthy number of reviews, especially for something on Early Access which, naturally, will keep many gamers away (as it’s not a full release). Despite the fact that most of these reviews will be from fanboys, the 100% approval rating for an EA release, shows that Arcen are not slacking with their from their usual standards (you can trust these guys to deliver a quality, fun, and unique product).

Early Access is still Early Access, and Arcen are using this service exactly as intended – By this I mean; they have given their customers a working and fun product, but one that is still incomplete. Within a day of release, Arcen released a further update to the game, with extra content and various bug fixes and tweaks, and with an apology for the less than full list of additional content. This is typical Arcen deprecation, they get hit with the same problems as other devs: feature creep, bugs etc.. which lead to inevitable delays, but they handle these problems speedily and with humility and always give you more game than they initially promised. Case in point: Many planned features for AI War 2 EA release have been pushed back slightly, but this was due to Arcen adding an entire extra faction to the game, based on the work of one of their fans!

I am gushing somewhat, and I’ve not actually told you a thing about AI war 2. But, with the constant deluge of shitty AAA (and some indie) Dev behaviour, a company like Arcen seems like one worth gushing over. But now, to the game….

AI War 2 is the sequel to the acclaimed AI war series, Arcen’s flagship title. AI War is a space-based RTS that broke the mould, by making the AI impossible to beat in a head-on fight. In practical terms, this means you are pitted against a vastly superior force, who are not only faster more numerous and more powerful than you but have a very smart AI too. The only chance you have is to remain as innocuous as possible and try not draw the attention of your enemy as you gradually build your forces, you are aided by the fact that the AI has other enemies to deal with, but they won’t keep the AI occupied forever so you have to work smart and work fast and strike at the optimum moment.

AI War 2 is designed on the same premise as the first AI War. Notable differences include more factions and customisation, greater mobility and stability, multithreading technology for better performance, 3d instead of 2d units, revamped UI and additional controls, more polished gameplay and mechanics, spoken dialogue from 25 different voice actors, new musical score, and more XML documents to allow for a ‘crazy’ amount of modding.

As you might have guessed, AI War 2 has got my attention, so I’ll be breaking down its gameplay and general condition further for your benefit, in a PJ Preview coming soon.