Heart of the Machine (Early Access)

Heart of the Machine was provided by Hooded Horse for review. Thank you!

This review was created using an LCD Steam Deck. OLED testing will be carried out at a later date.

As an Early Access title, gameplay and performance is subject to change.

Indie publisher Hooded Horse is one of my favorite game publishers, and Heart of the Machine is another fascinating title under their umbrella. Developed by Arcen Games, Heart of the Machine is surprisingly ambitious for a turn-based 4X title. I love games that push boundaries and the genre they represent, and while that endeavor comes with a steep learning curve, I am enthralled by this game.

Set in a brutal cyberpunk world, Heart of the Machine takes place in a crumbling city filled with criminal gangs and ordinary folk trying to survive. Players take on the role of an illegal sentient AI who escapes their lab and is forced to take shelter in the city.

With unimaginable potential and learning what it means to be alive, Heart of the Machine guides players through an extensive narrative. Early Access can mean many things in the industry, with launch builds ranging from a barebones experience to a ‘fully playable’ game needing further polish. For this title, players can play the prologue, Chapter One, and a large chunk of Chapter Two. It might not sound like much content, but this is an incredibly complex game that will make the content worthwhile.

Chapter One is an extensive tutorial, and the gameplay loop gradually reveals itself to the player. You set up a Network Tower as a base of operations and develop structures to bolster your processing power while recruiting androids you find in the procedurally generated city. Androids can be used to scout and find spots to investigate to further your growth, but be warned that Gang Members around the city can attack and steal their gear.

All units have a movement point system that replenishes every turn, but I like how everyone shares the action point system (mental energy in this game), so you have to be cautious when planning. Moving androids around the map also uses up an action point, and in the beginning, you have limited power while trying to survive.

I recommend playing the tutorial. It guides players through the gameplay loop, but it took me a while to scratch the surface, even with the in-game codex. Despite its complexity, Heart of the Machine is one of the more accessible 4X games I have played. It takes time to learn the tricks, but it is fairly easy to wrap your head around. I appreciate how Arcen Games also eases you into the gameplay, with mechanics and abilities gradually opening up the more you play so you don't get overwhelmed.

Chapter Two is when the game takes the training wheels off, and the full scale of the game sinks in. Even while you’re scrambling about developing your city, there are devastating Doom events that will strike the city and must be prepared for. The default mode gives more time to explore and experiment, but there are higher difficulty modes if you fancy an even more significant challenge. A Final Doom is the ‘endgame’ to fight against, but it is not the end even if you fail.

The difficulty ramps up after the first power grid is built and you receive your first narrative decisions. Many choices are offered to you that shape the narrative, and it is deeply compelling. It is around this time that the first severe attack on your Network Tower begins, and it initially caught me completely off guard.

Buildings get destroyed quickly, and after a certain amount of damage, they will stop working until they are repaired. My first significant battle with enemy forces became a hilarious struggle as I desperately moved my team of androids back to the Network Tower to protect my fledgling empire. I got pasted, so I had to reload a save from a few turns before moving more androids back to my base in preparation. Lesson learned!

I appreciate the visual design. The sprawling city might lack finer details; you won’t see the streets crawling with people going about their lives, but the cyberpunk ambiance is fitting. Cars trundle down roads and fly over the city, and military forces occupy fortified map sections. It does not sound imposing, but Heart of the Machine looks nicer than many 4X games, and the soundtrack is great, too.

The number of things to keep track of in Heart of the Machine is immense, and the game’s complexity will not be for everyone. If the tutorial were not as intuitive as it is, I would find the game too obtuse, even for veteran 4X players. For example, I spent hours wondering how to increase my Android capacity until I discovered forming a Shell company did that, and I found nothing in the tuition that mentioned it. However, I can happily say it isn't like that, and it was digestible enough to understand the mechanics.

Heart of the Machine - Steam Deck Performance

Arcen Games has paid much attention to making Heart of the Machine work on the Steam Deck, and the overall experience is solid. However, a couple of things hold it back.

While full controller support is not yet implemented, Arcen Games has set up a default controller profile that works well. The interface is also surprisingly easy to read with how many menus you can access, but the amount of information available on screen can make navigating challenging.

Recommended Settings

The number of graphical options you can tweak in the Heart of the Machine is enormous. However, there is a dedicated Steam Deck graphics preset already in the game, and this is the one I used. With stock settings and an untouched TDP, the performance was stable across the board.

This is quite the ambitious 4X game regarding controls and visuals. In this game, you can adjust the camera in many angles, and the city has a lot of action going on in default mode. While the game stayed at 60 FPS most of the time in standard settings, I saw a couple of frame dips when zooming out or during combat with several enemies simultaneously. These drops weren’t frequent and happen on more powerful hardware, regardless. I lowered the FPS cap to 40 with a 40hz refresh rate and found that to be the most stable profile.

With all the effects happening on screen, I should not have been surprised by the power draw, but it did nonetheless. With these settings, I found an average power draw of 17 watts, especially when you progress further in Chapter One and beyond. It often spiked as high as 20 watts during more cluttered scenery. When playing with my recommended settings, you should expect roughly two and a half hours of battery life on the LCD Steam Deck.

Battery Saver Settings

There are some ways to improve battery life. Reducing the number of vehicles that roam the map on screen helps, but we can do more. Turn-based games usually get away with a lower framerate than other titles, so I experimented with TDP settings.

With a 40hz refresh rate, Heart of the Machine still requires some power to run smoothly. Even when I changed the graphics preset to Very Low, I needed at least a TDP of 5 to maintain stable frames. At minimum settings, the visuals are rather blurred and muddy, but it lowered the average power draw to 13 watts, which is a significant drop.

Until we see some performance patches during Heart of the Machine’s post-launch, this is probably the best we can manage for battery life. By sacrificing framerate and some visual quality, you can gain an average of an hour of battery life while maintaining acceptable performance.

Accessibility

The game is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Usually, we list all the accessibility settings available, but there are so many options that I barely know where to begin! There is colorblind support through high-visibility unit colors, larger NPC hitboxes when targeting, toggle screen shake, freely change and toggle all the interfaces on and off, change camera sensitivity, and toggle Vsync.

You can also change the font size, toggle a few different font styles, and change the line spacing. There is more than what I have listed here, but Heart of the Machine’s accessibility settings should be the golden standard from now on.

Conclusion

Heart of the Machine’s ambition and complexity is a breath of fresh air for better and worse. Whenever I thought I had scratched the surface of what was on offer, the game opened up further. The bigger surprise is how well all these mechanics blend, and I have not had this much fun learning a 4X strategy game in years.

However, this is not a game for inexperienced players. The learning curve is steep even for a 4X game, and I have struggled despite my experience with strategy titles. The tutorials and codex go a long way towards making the game not feel obtuse, but it is still a ton of information to digest. The Steam performance is good, but watch out for the high power consumption. This is one early-access game to be excited about, and I can't wait to see how it develops!

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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