Ashes of the Singularity II Is Playable Right Now During Steam Next Fest

Ashes of the Singularity II has a substantial demo live on Steam for the duration of Next Fest.

The demo gives you two of the three playable factions, the United Earth Forces and the Post-Human Coalition, in skirmish mode against AI or full multiplayer for up to 8 players with AI backfill. Three maps cover small, medium, and large configurations for 2 to 8 players, across arctic and desert environments with day and night cycles. Save and load functionality is included.

What’s not in the demo: the third faction (the Substrate), the full single-player campaign, procedural map generation, and custom hotkey bindings.

For anyone unfamiliar with the game, Ashes of the Singularity II is a large-scale RTS built around strategy over mechanics. Clicks-per-minute won’t win games here. Armies run into the thousands of units across continent-sized battlefields, with a Strategic Zoom system that lets you manage everything from orbital view down to the frontline. Logistics, planning, and terrain matter. As structures fall and territory converts to or from Turinium, the battlefield changes in real time, so the map you started on isn’t the map you finish on.

The setting is a near-future solar system fractured between three factions with distinct motivations. The United Earth Forces represent a coalition of world powers pushing back against AI and post-human expansion, formed after a group of post-human technologists converted the surface of the moon into Turinium without governmental approval. The Post-Human Coalition emerged from the researchers who developed the Haalee AI and then uplifted themselves, betting that super-intelligence aligned with post-human interests was safer than one aligned with no one’s. Haalee and the Substrate, the third faction sitting out the demo, view humanity as having served its evolutionary purpose and the post-humans as a threat to be contained.

Each faction plays differently as a result. The UEF focuses on reclaiming territory and restoring order, the PHC on pragmatic expansion, and the Substrate on overwhelming AI force. The full campaign puts you in the UEF seat for a single-player narrative, but the demo’s skirmish and multiplayer modes let you test both available factions before the full release.

The demo is live now on Steam. Developer livestreams are running throughout the event.