Unigine Announces Its OilRush Game For Linux

Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?

Unigine OilRush is this new game created by these Russian developers and it is described by Unigine as follows:

OilRush is a real-time strategy game based on the group control. It offers mechanics of a classical RTS combined with a Tower Wars genre: control construction and upgrading of production platforms as well as their defence forces, and send battle groups of naval and air units to capture enemy's platforms and oil rigs.

Challenging gameplay takes you through rushing swarms of furious enemies in every battle. The winning requires intelligent branching of technology researches and all the variety of tactics you can engage.

Multiplayer over LAN and Internet is also available in the game.

As Unigine is a Linux-friendly company and they already provide the most advanced OpenGL demos for Linux (albeit Unigine can really tax your graphics card), it should come as no surprise this game will be released for Linux. Not only will it be released for Linux with its OpenGL 3.x/4.x renderer, but it will be released at the same time as their Windows client! This release is expected in Q4'2010.

OilRush sounds like it will be a very interesting game and from the screenshots and teaser video enclosed in this article, it will be another visually rich creation from Unigine Corp that may even step up the notch compared to Unigine Heaven. Though if you are using an open-source Mesa / Gallium3D driver for your hardware, don't expect to run OilRush unless you switch over to a high-performance proprietary driver.

If Valve doesn't release the native Linux Steam client this calendar year, OilRush may go down as this year's biggest Linux game release -- sadly it doesn't face much in the way of Linux game competition. There's also Primal Carnage and other games slowly coming about too that will have native Linux clients and are based on the Unigine engine. There was also another Unigine game project we talked about last year that was being developed and would have a native Linux client, but those screenshots from last year look nothing like OilRush, so we are waiting on hearing back from Unigine Corp whether a second game will be announced in due time. Certainly we hope Unigine Corp will also release a benchmark/demo of this game too when it's ready for release.

The web-site for this first Unigine title is OilRush-Game.com where it will eventually be available for purchase as a digital download.