Unigine OilRush Drills Closer To Release

While Unigine Corp has yet to provide any public beta of its forthcoming OilRush strategy game or to even begin the pre-order process for interested Windows and Linux gamers, following our exclusive preview of Unigine OilRush back in December using an early development build available to Unigine Corp partners, we now have an updated build. This new build, which still is only available to Unigine's partners and deemed confidential, now puts OilRush at version 0.54 while running atop the very latest Unigine Engine.

Compared to the Unigine OilRush v0.3 build we had back in December for the original preview, the new OilRush v0.54 development build is much more polished as the game's release date nears. In particular, we are seeing much better performance numbers (these screenshots in this article are from a Core 2 Duo + Radeon HD 4850 setup where the frame-rates were 60~100 FPS with the visual settings maxed) and even at this point, the Unigine developers are still optimizing the game for CPU and graphics performance. Of course, this is running natively under Ubuntu Linux with the proprietary graphics drivers.

The in-game menus with this newest private OilRush build are also much improved when compared to the previous build. There is also new artwork and game improvements within this release. The game is certainly looking great. OilRush v0.54 was made available to the selected parties on 1 February. Unigine developers are still working on the single-player campaign mode and some of the strategy game's units.

The last we heard from Unigine Corp is that the OilRush game is expected to be released for Windows and Linux in the next month (March 2011). When we have more information, we will pass it along.