Someone looked at Iron Harvest and Company of Heroes and said, “Yes, but what if we turned it up?” The result is Veil of Ashes, an incoming dieselpunk mecha RTS set in an alternate history that trades the usual grim realism for something with considerably more walking death machine energy. Riveted steel legs, diesel smoke, and enough tonnage to flatten a trench line. The Doctor approves of this direction in RTS design. STRONGLY.

The pitch: imagine the interwar period, but the arms race went sideways into giant mechanical warfare instead of just, you know, regular catastrophic human warfare. The game leans hard into combat and strategy over base-building micromanagement, which means you spend your time actually commanding dieselpunk monsters on the field rather than clicking a barracks menu seventeen times. If you have ever looked at a 1920s diesel engine and thought “that should be a leg,” this game was made for you specifically, and also for me, and we should probably form a club.

No firm release date is nailed down yet, but the visual fidelity screenshots making the rounds are genuinely striking. Wishlist it, bookmark it, carve a reminder into a gear with a calipers. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-piloted dieselpunk mech comes close.