An Exclusive Preview Of Unigine's OilRush Game
At the beginning of September there was the announcement from Unigine Corp that they were going to be releasing their first in-house game known as OilRush. The Unigine Engine has been in development for more than five years and has powered some very impressive technology demos / benchmarks, but has not really been utilized in many games yet. There's some games coming atop this engine (including those that won their game development competition), but OilRush is really the first game to set the stage for Unigine on PC, Linux, and PlayStation 3 platforms. OilRush is being released in March of 2011, but we have secured an internal development build of this strategy game to offer you the very first and exclusive preview with a number of screenshots.
On Saturday was Unigine Corp's very first focus group testing of their inaugural game. This testing took place in-person at Unigine's office in Tomsk, Russia and was deemed a huge success. As mentioned yesterday, after this focus group was completed, Unigine Corp kindly sent over to us an unreleased build of OilRush for Windows and Linux. OilRush was originally set to be released in Q4'2010 before it was pushed back to March, but the game at this point is in largely great shape. The multi-player portion is effectively complete with LAN and Internet support, the single-player campaign portion is being finished off, and it's largely now done to enhancing the user-interface, implementing performance optimizations, and ironing out any bugs.
OilRush will go into beta in the coming weeks. Unigine will be allowing beta access of this game to those who pre-order a copy, which is actually coming at a very, very reasonable price, but we'll wait for Unigine Corp to publicly announce their pricing plan before sharing the rest of that information. We might also be giving away some beta access here at Phoronix. Pleasing many gamers, especially Linux users, will be the fact that Unigine OilRush will not be using any DRM (Digital Rights Management) platform.
From our few hours of testing the 2010-12-18 build, this real-time strategy game is in rather great shape. There are a few unpolished areas and engine bugs left, but nothing serious and they will be worked out before the March release.
Within our development build the quick games and those within the multi-player mode so far include the Arctic, Rain, Jungle, Evening, and Extract 1000 Oil maps. Within the OilRush quick modes you can play against the computer with easy, normal, and hard skill sets or you can have the computer face-off against itself with its artificial intelligence engine on both sides.