DEVLOG #16

Stone and ice

Five boss arenas got cover that does not break.

• Wave 40, the Revenant: a colossal stone head rises from the jungle floor in the centre of the arena when the fight starts and sinks away when it ends. The Revenant's crystals never spawn behind it or on top of it.
• Wave 60, the Harbinger: a ruined church wall with its gothic window and a fallen column rises in the bottom left. Duck behind it when the spiral comes round.
• Wave 70, the Phantom: an ice barricade rises in the top-left corner.
• Wave 90, the Monarch: a burial mound of rubble and bones, east of the centre. Cover from his escort's crossfire, the middle stays open.
• Wave 100, the Overlord: his old wall is gone. Two burial mounds now stand on the diagonal, one west and low, one east and high: a flank to fall back to on either side, open lanes through the middle where he lands.
• Real cover: nothing destroys it, and no round passes through it, from either side. Not armor piercing, not the railgun, not a flamethrower. Bullets ricochet off it.
• Room to move: the arena around it is kept clear, so operators, hostiles and bosses can always walk round it. It scales with your screen, from the Steam Deck to a 4K monitor.
• The last two fights are the darkest: the Monarch now always fights on the Ashlands, the Overlord on Scorched Earth, and the ground sinks another 25% into the dark. Units, rounds and the HUD stay as bright as ever.

Nothing stalls against a wall

• Bosses smash ordinary cover. Crates, walls and barrels break the moment a boss walks into them. Fixed cover stays, and a boss walks round it, or teleports behind it if that is in its kit. It never lands inside it.
• Hostiles slide. An enemy that presses into an obstacle now steps left or right along it. If it stays pinned, the obstacle takes the strain and gives way.
• Fixed cover means a detour. At waves 40, 70 and 100 hostiles understand the cover is permanent and pick a route round it to reach you.

If it touches, it counts

Playing the Commando and the Sniper, rounds kept flying through grunts. The cause: every enemy was hit as a single circle, and that circle covered anywhere from a fifth to four fifths of the enemy you actually saw. Heads, rifles and shoulders stuck out of it.

• Every enemy is now hit on its real shape, traced from its own sprite, frame by frame, mirrored with it.
• Along the whole flight path, so fast rounds can no longer skip past a target between two frames. Cover and enemies are checked in the order the round meets them.
• In our tests a minigun stream on a grunt went from 62% to 91% of rounds landing, the shotgun from 48% to 68%. On every enemy type, 100% of rounds that touch the drawn body now hit, and 0% of rounds through empty air.

Break the shield

A boss in shield used to be untouchable for five seconds, so you waited. Now every boss opens every phase behind a shield, and there is no timer: it stays up until you break it.

• While it holds, every weapon does 2% damage and the health bar does not move. The boss bar shows how much shield is left.
• The Baron now deploys behind a full shield too. Shoot it down before you touch his health.
• The bosses' own shields (the Warlord's cycle, the Monarch's, the Overlord's) also soak 98% instead of blocking everything.

The first bosses fight back

Top builds no longer melt them. A mythic sniper with a perk-heavy build put out 25,000 damage per second against an Overlord whose armour lets about 2,500 through in full. What went over still counted for 30%, on the shields too: the Titan fell in 2.8 seconds, the Overlord in 40.

• A shield takes nothing above the armour limit. No build breaks one faster than the armour allows.
• On health what goes over the limit now counts for 10%, so a stronger build still wins faster, but it cannot delete a boss.
• The Overlord holds a little longer as the final fight, and the Thermobaric Warhead no longer strips 8% of a boss's health past its shield.
• The result with every evolution and a strong build: Titan 17 seconds, Phantom 56, Monarch 80, Overlord about two minutes. The sniper, the minigun and the flamethrower now land within a second of each other.

A test bot with no upgrades at all, standing still with its starting machine gun, beat the first three bosses in well under a minute, while the Inferno at wave 30 took it almost two. The first bosses now hold the line longer:

• Baron Mk I (wave 5): 1,200 → 1,900 HP and tougher armor.
• Titan (wave 10): 2,200 → 5,000 HP.
• Warlord (wave 20): 4,000 → 8,000 HP.
• Emergency Adrenaline kicks in below 35% HP (was 30%) and gives 45% to 85% extra damage and speed, 5% more at every level. Blast Radius now grows your explosions by 20% per level, and the edge of the blast keeps real damage.

Your turrets, your call

Turrets used to drop on their own, sometimes four in one clump, and sometimes they seemed to vanish. Now every turret you earn is a charge in a slot next to your weapons, and you decide where it goes.

• Keyboard and mouse: press T or click the slot, then click to place. Placement stays open while you have charges left. Esc closes it.
• Controller and Steam Deck: D-pad up puts a turret down in front of you, in the direction you aim. Tested on Xbox, DualSense, Switch Pro and generic pads.
• Destroyed? The slot recharges for 10 seconds, then the charge is yours again.
• Turrets also have their own firing sound again.

A new weapon bar

• Every weapon in its own colour, the same colour as its pick-up on the field, so you know at a glance what you are about to grab.
• The weapon art changes when you evolve it. You see your upgrade the moment you take it.
• It follows your input: number keys with keyboard and mouse, D-pad directions with a controller. And you can click it.
• The WEAPON ACQUIRED card and the weapon box bottom right are redrawn in the same style, and they always show the full name: ROCKET LAUNCHER, not ROCKET LAU… The active slot in the bar grows to fit it.
• Hostiles counter: on boss waves it shows the full total from the first second, instead of counting up as reinforcements arrive.
• Pick-ups stack: grab a second sprint or double dash and its time adds up, without a cap.

A new opening

• The intro is new: the war in hard black and white, cut on the beat and faster with every bar. Every shot is used once, and every face sits left or right of the frame, so nothing hides behind the logo. The logo comes in huge, settles in one move and lands on the drop, then floods into colour beside a Marine and the Inferno. Three last pings ring out, each with a glint across the logo, then it fades to black. About fifteen seconds, and any key or button skips it.
• No more flash at the start: a new run used to open on the map of your last run and then fade to the real one, and the cover moved a moment later. Every deploy and every retry now opens on its own map, and the cover you see is the cover you get.

Patch them up

Your squad could only fight, fall and wait to come back. Now it can be kept alive, and so can you. Two new cards, one new mythic, and one rule for all of them: a heal circle round you, and everything inside it heals at once. You, your escorts, your turrets.

• Field Medic: a medic in white joins your squad. He takes no slot of his own: the card appears once one of your squad cards reaches LV3, or once it has evolved into its mythic. Everyone in the circle heals 3 to 7 HP per second, downed escorts are back in 4 seconds instead of 8, at LV4 a second medic keeps the circle up when one falls, and at LV5 a heal pulse every 10 seconds gives everyone in it 15% of their health back. You get at most 5 HP per second from the medics, the rest is for the squad.
• Medevac Drone: a support card for every operator, the Navy SEAL included. It heals you first, 2 to 6 HP per second, the others in the circle at half that. From LV3 it sends a heal pulse, from LV4 that pulse also puts out fire and frost on you.
• Guardian Angel: the Medevac Drone's mythic evolution. Once per wave, when a hit should kill you, the drone catches you: you stand up with 40% health and three seconds of cover. It waits until your own Second Chance is spent. And it keeps your shield topped up as well as your health.
• You can tell who heals whom: friendly healing is warm gold, a soft dome with four crosses gliding round its rim and small crosses rising from whoever it patches up. The enemy Medic still heals in turquoise. Both have their own quiet sound, there when you listen for it, never over the fight.
• In the debrief and the pause loadout you see how much health your healers gave back.

On file

Command keeps a file on every deployment. Now you can read it. SERVICE RECORD sits in the main menu where the co-op row used to be: co-op is not ready yet, and it stays out of the menu until it is.

• Your record: furthest wave, total kills, bosses defeated, time in the field, best score, kills per minute, average wave, casings earned, health healed and your favourite weapon.
• Your most played operator stands beside it in his own colour.
• The road to wave 100: the ten commanders over a track from 1 to 100, lit up as you reach them, with a marker for each operator at his furthest wave.
• Every operator on his own: switch with LB and RB, Q and E, the D-pad or a click, on every screen from the Steam Deck to 4K.
• Your history comes along: the totals start from what the game already knew about your runs. Per operator it counts from this update. It is saved with your other progress, so Steam Cloud carries it to every PC.

Felt in every run

• Grenade launcher: grenades fly 20% further, at the same speed, and go off the moment they touch a unit, even when they only graze its edge.
• From wave 50 the war gets stranger: 10% more hostiles, and every wave brings its own Harvesters, Voltaics and Amplifiers on top of its squads, more of them the closer you get to wave 100. Each still waits for its own debut.
• Lightning you feel: a Voltaic strike now lands with a thunderclap under it, and the storm's bolts are louder. The healers' sounds are a touch louder too.
• Smoke Screen (Soldier, LV40) no longer trades the mortar for smoke. The shells explode as before and leave the smoke behind, and everything a blast catches is pinned down for three seconds: no shots, no strikes, bosses included.
• A weapon you already carry on the ground is now simply ammo: it fills that weapon up and says so over the pick-up, without a WEAPON ACQUIRED card.
• Command has a voice: every Command HQ call on the radio is now spoken by one heavy, steady field voice, with three takes of each line so it never sounds the same twice. The subtitle types along with him.
• A cleaner main menu: START MISSION, SERVICE RECORD, SCOREBOARD, INTEL DOSSIER.
• Weapon mythics are earned: a weapon's mythic evolution is only offered once you own all three of its normal evolutions. It used to show up after two.
• Weapon evolutions could never be rerolled or banished, yet the buttons were there. They are gone from that screen; SKIP stays.
• Two or three Barons at once: every Baron's bar now shows his shield going down, just like a single boss bar.

Gone into the green

The Guerrilla's Camouflage promised that hostiles would not see you. In practice it only made a few long shots miss, and everything else walked straight up to you. It has been rebuilt from the jungle up.

• Hold your fire and you vanish into the undergrowth: after 3 seconds at LV1, 1.4 seconds at LV5. Standing still gets you there faster than moving.
• Hostiles lose you. They break off and comb the bush round the spot where you disappeared, each on its own side, never right on top of you. Only one that comes very close (150 px at LV1, 90 px at LV5) finds you.
• The ambush: your first second and a half of fire out of cover hits 40% to 120% harder, and gives you away. So does taking a hit.
• Commanders are not fooled. Bosses keep coming. And unlike the Commando's cloak, you can still be hit while you hide.

Clear the red lines

Command is getting the strike package ready that will flatten this zone, and it does not wait for you to leave. A few times every run, a few seconds into a wave, Command comes on the radio: "Air strike inbound on your position. Get off the red lines."

• You hear it first. The jet's roar builds a few seconds before you see it. Then a red lane lights up across the whole map, right through where you stand, with arrows running the way it will fly.
• Then it comes. A black jet streaks over the lane nose first, and a chain of bombs follows it from one end of the map to the other. When the chain passes you, you feel it: the screen shakes, the camera is thrown aside, a white flash, a shock wave, and for a second your hearing goes dull.
• Three to five passes, every one on a new line. Standing still means a hit (22% of your health); a dash takes you through. Ordinary hostiles caught in the lane do not get up, and every one of them counts as your kill. Lure them in.
• From wave 50 they come in pairs: two jets side by side over a wider lane, each with its own chain.
• Never on top of something else: no airstrike during a barrage, a boss fight or a Baron.

A breath between two waves

There is no extraction from this zone. But now and then Command sends something else: a Lifeline. It is rare. When a Commander goes down, or when you silence a barrage by killing every spotter, Command may authorise one, and a beacon drops near you. Pick it up and Atlas-6 is on call. Two per run at most, and in plenty of runs you will not see one at all.

• You choose the moment. Press H, or D-pad down on a controller or the Steam Deck. Then finish the wave. Calling it on the last wave before a boss is a decision you will feel.
• The zone goes quiet. No next wave yet. Smoke shells arc in from beyond the map and land one by one round the perimeter, until a wall of smoke closes the zone off. Then nothing. A few seconds to breathe.
• Green smoke, then Atlas-6. Two green smoke markers go up. You hear the twin rotors long before the Chinook comes in over the smoke, its downwash blowing the plumes flat.
• Care packages come down on a cable from its ramp, one on each marker. The first fills every weapon you carry. The second fills them again and gives you 30% health and 30% shield back.
• "We don't take passengers." Atlas-6 lifts off and flies out, and only then does the next wave come.

Your gun, your call

You told us: run a weapon dry in the middle of a boss fight and the game picked the next one for you. It went for whatever had the most evolutions, which on the field felt like a random jump at the worst possible moment. That call is yours now.

• Pick your favourites. Pause, open LOADOUT and click a weapon (A on a controller). It gets a number, 1 to 4. Click it again to take it off.
• Run dry, and you go to your first loaded favourite. Is that one empty too, or not in your kit this run, the next one takes over. No favourites set? You go back to the weapon you held before. Never to a gun you did not choose.
• Keep them if you want to. Under LOADOUT, tick KEEP FAVOURITES FOR NEXT RUN and your order carries over. Leave it off and every run starts clean. A short explanation shows as soon as you focus a weapon, and a green SAVED confirms every change.
• Numbers only count what you carry. Two weapons in your kit means favourites 1 and 2, never a lonely 4.
• A new weapon never jumps into your hands. Walk over a shotgun with your pistol out and you keep the pistol. You switch when you decide to. The number keys follow the weapon bar: 1 is the first slot, 2 the second.
• You see it coming. The weapon bar shows your numbers, and the gold one is where you go when the gun in your hands runs out. When it happens, a short line over the bar tells you: SHOTGUN EMPTY → LASER CANNON.
• An ammo box only gives back what the switch took. If the game moved you off your shotgun and you pick up ammo, the shotgun comes back. A weapon you chose yourself stays in your hands.

The pistol you keep

The pistol never runs out of ammo, and until now that was the only reason to hold it. Its mythic, Fan the Hammer, did not change that. Now it does.

• Four times the rate of fire, and at least 105 damage in every round. With Burst Fire and Akimbo that is five rounds per pull, nearly ten pulls a second, and it never needs ammo.
• Heavier, slower rounds. Our first version hit 300 a round and flew twice as fast. It erased every boss in seconds, so on 7 November we cut it back: still a hand cannon, no longer a delete button.
• It sounds like a hand cannon. A heavy new shot on every round, cut tight so ten a second stay a hammering rhythm and never turn into noise.
• And it looks like one. A neon lime blast out of the muzzle, light on the ground, sparks on every hit and a ring on every kill. Each kill still throws a fan of five rounds forward, so a crowd goes down in a chain.
• Vortex Gun and Ice Beam hit 20% harder. The two late weapons stay at the top of the arsenal.

One more life, in plain words

Every operator's last upgrade is a second chance: the first hit that should kill you leaves you standing. Each one has its own name, and that was the problem. Halfway through a run nobody remembers what Dead Man's Switch means, and a line that said ARMED or ACTIVE did not help.

• A gold heart and EXTRA LIFE ×1. That is all you need to know while it waits.
• When it saves you, it says what protects you. SAVED · IMMUNE, or SAVED · CLOAKED for the Commando and the Guerrilla, with the seconds left and a bar running down. The banner reads EXTRA LIFE USED and lists what your operator does next.
• Then the heart cracks. EXTRA LIFE USED stays on your panel, so you know the next hit is for real.
• The shop uses the same words. All six upgrades now start with EXTRA LIFE in their description.

Every gun earns its slot

We put every weapon through the same test: all four evolutions, thirty seconds on a boss, and four late waves back to back. Machine gun, sniper, Vortex and Ice Beam felt right and measured right. Three did not.

• Rocket Launcher, much heavier. 170 direct damage and 150 in the blast (was 90 and 80), a faster trigger, faster rockets, 20 in the tube and a bigger bonus against bosses. On a boss it now does more than two and a half times what it did.
• Minigun. 14 damage a round (was 11), spins up in 0.45 seconds instead of 0.7, and a tighter stream.
• Flamethrower. 12 damage (was 10), a longer reach and the fire passes through four hostiles instead of three.
• Laser, Omni Pulse. The mythic beam turns half again as fast, so in a boss fight it finds the boss sooner.
• Sergeant, Short Fuse. The upgrade cut the grenade's fuse and its flight with it: at full level a grenade landed at less than half the launcher's range. Now the grenade flies faster instead. Same full range, it just gets there sooner.

Heavier at the top

• Stampede from wave 85. Always a Swarm, three ranks deep and side by side, landing as one wall.
• Baron Mk V. The last Baron opens straight into his spiral, denser than before, and fires his shockwaves from inside it. Ram and artillery come between spirals.
• The Overlord fights alone. Dark Commanders still heal everything around them, but never the Overlord. Its entry and phase shields are 10% lighter.