Broken Arrow devs confirm their anti-cheat will not block Linux, SteamOS

Broken Arrow recently released on Steam, promising to provide a fresh large-scale real-time modern warfare tactics game.

One issue though for gamers on Linux and SteamOS based systems, is that it has anti-cheat. It's not the usual sort either, it's their own home-grown "Broken Arrow Anti-Cheat System". Given that anti-cheat is often an issue for Linux gaming, I've been waiting on an official answer about this.

Yesterday they replied to note that the "anti-cheat shouldn't pose an issue for Proton compatibility since it doesn't work at a kernel level". So that's some good news. However, they also say "Proton hasn't been tested or officially supported by the dev team" so that's something to keep in mind. No intentional blocking, but not directly supported (which is the case for most games with anti-cheat). It's now listed on our dedicated anti-cheat page.

As a huge fan of RTS games, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try this one. The developers sent a key and happily I can see that it does indeed work out of the box with the latest Proton 9.0-4.

Broken Arrow is split across a campaign, skirmish battles, and the PvP online play which is a huge focus on it and likely what most people will be buying it for. The campaign, really, serves as just a nice intro to all the systems. Seems it's initially quite popular too with it settling on over 30,000 concurrent players for peak times regularly.

This is not an RTS on the level of base-builders like the recent Tempest Rising, the scale and style of it is much more like the Steel Division and Wargame series. I found those other similar games a bit too overloading on the details and controls though, so it was surprising to see just how easy Broken Arrow is to get into.

Here you get a certain amount of credits tick in that allows you to deploy units, that will appear from set locations and as you progress you'll get more credits to bring in various reinforcements. So it's not a game to spam units, everything needs a purpose on the battlefield, and so you have to be fully-focused on your planning and watching the map closely for where the fire is coming from.

As accessible as it is to initially get into there's a lot you need to learn to be effective in it, and that will take quite some time. Not just because of the vast amount of different units but how to make use of all of them across the map objectives, and how to properly react to the enemies you face as you get obliterated over and over. It's a fun challenge though, one I've enjoyed jumping into online matches to see if my latest tactical idea will work (spoiler: it never does).

This is why the campaign is pretty much essential to play first. There's so many constant moving parts, that you need a little guiding hand to walk you through what the heck you're supposed to do. With all the different types of weapons and fire modes, different armour types and so on — it's a game built for war nerds. Even with the masses of options, it still feels like a game where even my slow brain can actually become somewhat okay at it.

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Here all the different types of units have specific key roles too, it's not just about who has the bigger army. You'll need a specific set of units to overcome certain obstacles, it's all about the planning. Which is where the army customization comes in too. There's hundreds of units and thousands of possible combinations, so you can mix and match to try out different styles.

They had a few missteps at release, like missing Skirmish options for 1v1 and 2vs2 vs AI but thankfully they've solved it quickly and enabled it. Why didn't they have it to begin with? They said it was a design choice, as the current maps were not designed for less than 3 players per team but they're going to continue working on that along with AI improvements.

So far I've been having a really good time with it. The performance on my system has been reasonable. Playing at 2560x1440 with my Ryzen 5800x and Radeon 6800 XT on the Medium preset during the large-scale warfare has been smoothly over 80FPS. For an RTS like this on a huge map I'm happy with how it performs.

Great to see what's another big release (and an RTS too!) working so well on Linux at release.