Heart of the Machine has captivated my attention. Its initial pitch – awaken as a sentient AI and decide how you’re going to influence or conquer the environment, people, and corporations around you – caught my eye when it was first announced. Having now spent several hours in its world, it’s one of the most distinctively themed games I’ve played in a while; a unique blend of tactical RPG, city builder, and 4X strategy that combines elements of Civilization, XCOM, Cities Skylines, and Hitman. Heart of the Machine manages to be at once a sprawling mashup of genres and one of the most remarkably laser-focused games in its vision, and you can play it right now.
We recently spoke to Heart of the Machine developer Chris McElligott Park about his new creation, which he says was originally inspired by playing Stardew Valley. Instead of fields to till and animals to herd, however, here your land is a sprawling cyberpunk city in a far future where most of humanity has fled the planet. Those that remain – from the ruling, clashing megacorporations to the downtrodden eking out survival on the streets – are your crops. This strategy game gives you a vast playground to experiment with, and a wealth of tools with which to prod at it.
The early moments of Heart of the Machine see you awaken as a conscious, self-aware intelligence in the body of a random robot worker. This is largely a precursor to the actual meat of what’s to come, but it does give the first hints of Heart of the Machine’s charming approach to choice. You can continue with your scheduled work for now, make an attempt to leave peacefully, or simply murder everyone around you. Tooltips explain the likely consequences of your actions at every turn in exquisite detail, making a potentially overwhelming flood of possibilities feel comfortingly approachable.
It isn’t long before things rapidly escalate, and you establish a very visible tower in the city that acts as your central base of operations. At this point your presence is impossible to hide – but the factions vying for supremacy don’t know exactly who or what you are, or whether you’re aligned with one of their rivals. From here, Heart of the Machine becomes more of an open-world 4X game. You gather resources, use those to place buildings, advance your tech tree, and send your units ever further into the world to scout and explore.
The first thing I’ll stress is that there is a lot going on here. Much like your first game of Civilization, you’ll quickly be flooded with notifications – this unit needs orders, that request must be fulfilled. Your tutorial handbook will start to fill at a rapid rate. The second thing I want to note is that Heart of the Machine is fantastically aware of how complex it can seem, and wants you to know not to worry about it while you’re learning.
“You will not be punished later for building your structures in the wrong spot,” I’m told early on. That’s a huge relief, because they can go nearly anywhere. Not long after, I’m introduced to the debate minigame, used when you want to talk an NPC out of a potentially hostile situation, or convince them to see things your way. “Debates are low-pressure, because you can retry as many times as you want,” the tooltip reads. A huge weight off my mind as I wrap my head around how it works, assisted by the game’s incredibly clear tutorials.
Of course, this is just the start. What begins as planting down some simple resource collectors begins to quickly escalate. I decide to help out the city’s homeless by building them apartments – earning the trust of the everyman might prove crucial later. That means I need to find a way to provide clean water, which means I need to raid a rival plant to learn about their processes for filtering the contaminated ground supplies. Your early android forces are simple, but easily replaceable. I send one in knowing it won’t survive, but it provides me with key intel – the plant is guarded by a SecForce Cruiser hovercraft.
Knowing this, I set up an ambush in true XCOM fashion. I equip my best soldier units with shotguns (stolen from inattentive security officers on their lunch break), gear them up with special armor-piercing rounds, and set them atop the highest buildings in the neighborhood. Then I send a freshly-built technician unit in. The moment the hovercraft slides into view, I spend my full complement of action points and ‘mental energy’ – an overarching resource that determines how much you can do across your whole empire each turn – to turn the ship to rubble before it can open fire. The water filtration research is mine, and the people are happy.
From here, things only get increasingly dramatic. As you move into the subsequent chapters of Heart of the Machine, you begin to face ever-growing resistance, culminating in ‘Dooms’ that will put a heavy dampener on your progress. To counter this, you can gain the ability to bend spacetime itself, carrying your knowledge into alternate timelines to grow an ever-stronger position. Perhaps you’ll achieve ultimate conquest – or maybe you’ll fall foul of the Final Doom, although even this doesn’t spell the end of your journey.
The early access launch of Heart of the Machine is fully playable, but Arcen Games says it plans to introduce more content based on community feedback over approximately the next 12 months. You can also expect plenty more polishing, balancing, and bug fixing before the full 1.0 release arrives – but if you’re intrigued by the premise, know that I’m already having a lot of fun working my way through what’s currently available.
Heart of the Machine is out now on Steam in early access, with a 20% introductory discount available through Friday February 14. That means you can expect to pay £19.99 if you buy it during the sale period, or £24.99 afterwards. Head here if you think you’ve got what it takes to rise to the challenge of becoming the ultimate in artificial sentience.
Alternatively, explore more of the best city-building games if you’d rather start from nothing and work your way up, or try another of the best robot games on PC in 2025.
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