The rope doesn't wind you in — it just refuses to stretch. Gravity still has you, so you fall, the rope catches, and what's left of the fall turns the corner and becomes sideways speed. That's what crosses a gap with no floor in it. Reeling in at the end of an arc is how you gain height; reeling in while you hang straight underneath is simply a climb. A slack rope does nothing at all, so you can walk, jump and stand while still attached — and blowing the ground out from under the hook drops you.
Landscape only: the world is a wide format and a portrait phone leaves it a thin strip with the buttons nowhere near it.
A ghost follows the cursor showing exactly where the block will land, green when it will go in and red when it won't — it refuses to pour onto a person, yours or anyone else's. It will pour onto an enemy quite happily, which is a way to kill one.
Blocks are concrete, which small arms can't chew through, so this is the difference between a hole you hid in and something you built. Rotation is what makes it a base rather than a heap: a slab stood on end is a wall, at 45° it's a roof that sand runs off instead of piling on, and a wall on the diagonal is a buttress. Concrete pours around stone, existing concrete and gold seams rather than through them — so you can build into a cliff face without deleting the cliff or your ore.
PvP is off by default: your rounds and your explosions pass straight through the people you're playing with, which is the co-op rule everything else is tuned against. Turn it on in Settings and they're targets like anything else — direct hits and blast alike. Enemy fire never cared either way. Solo it changes nothing; there's nobody else to hit.
The pistol, grenade, shovel and grappling hook start unlocked (change that in Settings). Mine gold to unlock weapons and earn random upgrades — and you don't need to dig it out: walk into a seam and it comes with you.
Levels are the other progression, and you steer this one. Kills earn XP — a walker is worth one, a mech eight, a gunship thirty, the nuke carrier forty. Every level offers three upgrades down the left edge; press 1, 2 or 3, or click one. Nothing pauses while you read, and the panel waits as long as you need it to.
Where gold hands you bigger numbers, levels hand you different properties, and they combine: incendiary warheads set their own crater alight, toxic ones leave gas in it, cryo ones freeze the blast, cluster ones break apart in flight — and one shell can carry all four at once. Frost rounds make your pistol freeze what it kills. A reflective shield sends the round back instead of eating it. Two runs that both reached level six should be playing different games.
The railgun kills anything on foot in one shot, punches on through the body behind it, and drills straight through sand, stone and concrete — the steam trail shows exactly where it went. Five rounds, and a long reload.
Hold the trigger on the railgun. It charges while you hold and fires when you let go, and a bar over your head fills to white at full. What the charge buys is depth: a tapped round goes about a dozen cells into stone, a full one goes nearly sixty — in one side of a hill and out the other. Damage, pierce and recoil ride along with it. Letting go early is a real option, not a mistake: the shot still goes, just shallower.
Anything with a clip reloads itself once dry. Upgrades can add bursts, ground penetration, and mortar cluster shells — and a cluster shell now comes apart in flight, about three-quarters of a second after launch, into three contact-fused bomblets that land spread along the line of the arc. What the upgrade buys is width; what it costs is putting one shell on one man.
The rest of the surface arsenal. Each of these does something nothing else does, which is the only reason it's here:
Bunker ordnance. Seven weapons are never sold for gold and can't be chosen as a starting loadout — the only way to get one is to find a buried bunker, go down the shaft, and take it off the garrison. There's a stencilled olive crate on the floor of every chamber, and the men holding the room are between you and it. Each answers something nothing on the surface can:
People leave bodies, not craters. Shooting someone used to blow a hole in the floor and kill whoever was standing next to them. Now every death that leaves a body leaves a ragdoll: it tumbles, it comes to rest on the ground or floats in the water, and then it slumps into a heap that is solid, climbable and flammable. The floor of a long fight is the bodies from it — and a flamethrower can take that floor away. Machines are the exception: a mech still goes up, and leaves its hull.
Crates can contain a medkit (the commonest thing in one — heals you to full), stat boosts, a fireproof suit, a jetpack, a jump pack, body armor, a shield bubble, or a plane that carpets the battlefield in sand. Drones (two at most) and friendly shooters are rare, and the enemy can shoot both down — along with your sentries.
The fireproof suit means flame simply can't catch you — walk through a burning treeline, or set one alight at your own feet. Lava still hurts, just less: it isn't fire.
Jump pack. Not a second jetpack. The jetpack is a held thrust that turns the vertical axis into somewhere you live; this is one press and one launch, two and a half times a normal jump, thrown along whichever way you were already running. It's for getting over the thing in front of you — a crowd, a gap, a crater you have no business standing in.
Shield bubble. Eats exactly one hit, of any size, from anything, then takes ten seconds to come back. One hit rather than a pool of health, and that's the point: you know the instant it's gone and exactly when it's back, and in between you're a normal soldier. What it buys is the mistake — the mine you didn't see, the mortar you were too slow for.
Body armor. Stacks, up to half of all incoming damage stopped. It applies to bullets, blasts and being walked into, and to nothing else: fire, gas, lava and poisoned water go straight through it. Armour is for things that are shot at you.
Four more materials exist that you can't place by hand. Acid and vapour come out of the two flasks above. Scrap is what a wrecked machine leaves — solid, climbable, and the only structural material in the game that fire does not touch, so a downed gunship is permanent cover exactly where the biggest fight happened. Bodies are the fourth: they pile up, they hold, and they burn.
Fuel drums are stacked in the bunkers and the surface bases. They chain-detonate like TNT but wider, and unlike TNT they leave the room on fire. Shooting into a compound before you walk into it is usually the whole plan.
Ice isn't on this list because you can't place it by hand — only the Cryo Lance makes it. It's solid ground while it lasts, and it goes back to water wherever fire or lava reaches it.