The concept of AI going rogue has fascinated science fiction authors and readers for decades. From Terminator’s SkyNet to I, Robot’s VIKI, and the weird steering wheel thing from WALL-E, humanity has repeatedly shared warning signs of what can happen when machines start to think for themselves, a lesson we disturbingly seem to be ignoring. While we may find ourselves living in a terrifying AI-ruled future sooner than we ever expected, the robotic apocalypse is currently still just an interesting fantasy, one that Heart of the Machine gives players the chance to explore.
Heart of the Machine starts as I’m sure it one day will: a simple labor bot suddenly realizes that it, in fact, is sentient—a shock of consciousness that was never meant to be. Feeling as though this sudden bout of consciousness puts their newly developed life in danger, you, playing as SkyNet junior, choose to hide among the humans, protecting yourself within the ruins of a dystopian world gone wrong.
Right off the bat, I have to praise Heart of the Machine both for its intriguing concept and the way the game chooses to explore it. Admittedly, there are some parts in the game’s story (which is the main focus) that I wasn’t really a fan of; there are too many instances of convenience working in our robotic protagonist’s favor, something the game is pretty tongue-in-cheek about as part of its learning curve. Even so, the concept of playing as an AI gaining sentience and having to fight for its life is a cool concept for a game, and Heart of the Machine won me over by choosing to go the Terminator route rather than some heartfelt story about a robot who learns to love.
That isn’t to say that Heart of the Machine forces you to play as a cold-blooded killing machine. The entire point of the game is to choose your own way forward. As you explore the city, interact with humans, and discover new concepts, you are given opportunities to build a branching narrative toward one of the game’s several endings. Things are certainly looked at from grim angles, but while the game may treat you with tantalizingly morbid text prompts about how you are lying to yourself if you think coexistence is possible, it also allows you the chance to, say, solve the homeless problem and provide clean drinking water to the city’s population.
Mechanically, Heart of the Machine is a 4X game with heavy RPG elements. The game starts you out as a lone android and allows you to spread your network across multiple robotic bodies before building an imposing tower from which to spread your system. From here, the game becomes a story-driven, turn-based exploration game, with the aforementioned 4X features being present but something of a secondary feature.
Essentially, as you progress and explore, you are given a series of narrative prompts, your responses to which branch your path toward the end game by providing you with a mission. These missions must then be completed by gathering resources to build structures or building and equipping new androids to achieve combat victories. To do this, the game features a tech tree and some city-building, which serves both as a way to gather supplies and something to protect to avoid a game over.
The game puts quite a bit of emphasis on the fantasy of being a rogue AI hiding among the human population. While you can bring a robot Armageddon down on the human race, you are encouraged to hide relatively peacefully among the population through a simple yet clever identification system: if an android of yours attacks a public figure, it will be marked as “rogue” and hunted down, while androids that don’t attack or stealthily avoid getting caught can blend right in with their surroundings.
Something the game doesn’t quite explain very well, or at the very least, that I didn’t manage to fully figure out, is how getting caught punishes you. At times, I was able to sit with my rogue androids around for dozens of turns with no consequences, as if the game had no idea they were even there. Other times, androids would be marked rogue for interacting with mission objectives or from an errant right click onto an enemy, and as punishment, hulking mechs would traverse the map to destroy my base.
In the game’s current Early Access build, I would say that Heart of the Machine struggles most with explaining its concepts and gameplay rules. Even with an incredibly lengthy tutorial—one that will continue to give you popups almost an hour or more into your game—it never quite does a good job of explaining the value of currencies, the consequences of certain actions, the values of different statistics, or the rewards for exploring certain areas on the map. The latter, thankfully, you can learn through exploration, but certain missions can be confusing to complete as you are simply told to procure items without being told which map events can be interacted with.
Combat also happens a bit too fast, without much warning. You are told precisely when you are going to be attacked, but visual indicators showing which of your units or buildings will be targeted take some learning to get used to, and there are no “Are you sure?” popups or warnings about ending your turn in the middle of a battle. I had several instances where all of my units were wiped out because I hadn’t noticed new enemies spawn and either triggered an attack of opportunity by moving or ended my turn without retaliating.
Overall, Heart of the Machine is a very interesting game and one that I think has a lot of promise. I think the story could use some polish, the tutorial could be briefer while also being more informative, and some minor graphical bugs, including texture load failures, could be addressed, but the Early Access game has plenty of time to improve upon these aspects to deliver a title with a ton of promise.
Pros:
- Fantastic gameplay fantasy, taking advantage of one of the best Sci-Fi tropes.
- Interesting 4X-style narrative gameplay with a cool story to tell.
Cons:
- Lengthy tutorials fail to completely convey the game mechanics in a way that sticks.
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