Jump at a wall in mid-air and you kick off it, which is how you climb now. The grappling hook is gone from the loadout with the shovel, the turret and the mine: you carry a primary and an explosive, and there is nowhere for a movement tool to sit. Enemies still throw ropes at cliffs and your own helpers still climb them — it is only your loadout that lost it.
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.
Ladder and planking are the ways through what you build. Everything else the builder pours is concrete, which is the point of it — but a base you can only get out of by blowing a hole in it is a box you die in. A ladder goes up, planking is a floor you stand on and drop through with Down, and both place with the same ghost, rotation and refusal-to-pour-on-a-person as the rest. Planking turned upright is a wall you can walk through.
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 on. Your rounds and your explosions hit the people you are playing with, because you are racing them to the charge site and a race you cannot interfere with is a queue. There is still a switch for it in Settings if a group would rather run it as co-op. Enemy fire never cared either way, and solo it changes nothing; there is nobody else to hit.
The pistol and the grenade start unlocked (change that in Settings). Gold and crates are two separate tracks and do two different things. Mining gold makes what you are already carrying better — harder hits, longer reach, quicker reloads, bursts, cluster shells — and never hands you a new weapon. A weapon only ever comes out of a crate: one dropped under a parachute, or one on the floor of a bunker. Both are painted with the gun inside them, so you can see what a box is worth before you decide to cross a compound for it. You don't need to dig the gold out, either: walk into a seam and it comes with you.
A map is half a dozen biomes, not one. It used to be one kind of ground from end to end — dunes, or forest, or marsh. Now the width is divided into bands of roughly a screen each, every one of them a complete landscape with its own relief, soil, tree cover, water and cave network, blended into its neighbours so the ground never steps at a boundary. Crossing snow into close timber into flooded marsh on the way to the stronghold is most of what makes the crossing worth anything. Nothing announces them — you can see the ground change. The map is also well under half the width it was, for the same reason: the run is a raid on one stronghold, and the rest was ground you crossed once.
What the run wants from you is a nuke, placed. Every map has a stronghold: a walled compound with towers, a minefield outside it and a shaft under the yard going down to a bunker at bedrock. The spot the charge goes is at the bottom of that shaft, and the arrow across the top of the screen points at it the whole time, with the distance under it.
Placing it wins the raid outright. The moment somebody reaches the spot the charge is set, and three seconds of the stronghold going up is the ending — a blast front that opens outward and takes the compound with it. Then a board comes up naming whoever placed it, and the whole room lands on a brand new map, opening one wave harder than the last one did and another wave harder again the time after. Waves still escalate underneath all of that and each is called out as it lands; there is just no counter to watch, because the counter was never the point.
You can also see where everybody else is: anyone off the edge of your window gets their name, their distance and an arrow pinned to the edge they are past, greyed out while they are down.
You carry two things: a primary and an explosive. Not a list — two slots. An arms crate does not add a gun, it replaces the one in your hands, and the crate is painted with the weapon inside it so you can tell from across a compound whether crossing it is worth it. The explosive slot climbs instead of swapping: the mortar replaces the grenade and the rocket then replaces the mortar, and you cannot skip a rung. The machine gun still replaces the pistol the same way. The upshot is that finding a gun is a decision you live with rather than one more key on the row.
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.
Freezing is an upgrade now, not a gun. The Cryo Lance is gone; Frost Rounds makes your small arms freeze what they hit and leave anything they kill as a block of ice, and Cryo Warheads flash-freezes an explosion's crater — water and oil to ice, lava to stone, fires out. The ice is real ground you can walk on, and it melts wherever something hot touches it, so a floor laid over a lava flow is a floor with a countdown. A property your existing gun gains is a better home for it than a gun you had to give something up to carry.
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.
Some cards are plain numbers instead, and those ones stack — they can come up again and again. Long Barrels adds 40% to how far your guns reach, Heavy Rounds 35% to what they hit for (never less than a whole point, since enemy health is counted in pistol hits), and Stopping Power throws whatever you hit: bodies go off ledges, off walls and off you. Stopping Power is the one that helps most when you are losing, because what it buys is distance.
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. One weapon can't be chosen as a starting loadout — you go and find it. Every crate, wherever it comes from, is painted with what is inside it, and in a bunker the men holding the room are between you and it:
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. In a room there is one set of crates and the first person to reach one gets it; the drones and shooters that come out of one follow whoever opened it, and everybody can see them.
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.
Anything that arms you with fire comes with it. Picking up the flamethrower makes you fireproof, and so does taking any upgrade that sets your own weapons alight — Incendiary or Firebomb Warheads, Overcharge, Burning Propellant. All four put flame exactly where you are standing, so needing to find the suit first made it a prerequisite for your own gun rather than a pickup. Same immunity the suit gives, and it lasts the run.
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.
You heal. Ten seconds without taking any damage at all — no bullet, no blast, no fire, gas, acid or drowning — and health comes back at four a second until it is full. The delay is the point: ten seconds inside a wave is a very long time, so this never rescues the fight you are in. What it does is make the lull between waves worth something, and stop a bad exchange in wave three from still being paid for in wave fifteen. It is slower than every hazard in the game, so standing in a fire still kills you.
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.
Cycle these with Tab (and Shift+Tab to go back) — the number row and Q/E both belong to the weapons. The five with a key of their own still have it.
Three more materials exist that you can't place by hand. Acid comes from the Corrosive Warheads level-up: it runs downhill, works on whatever it settles against, and goes through stone and concrete, so a crater keeps growing after the bang. Every cell of it is spent on the one cell it dissolves, and water kills it outright. 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 third: they pile up, they hold, and they burn — and every weapon in the game chews through a heap of them, so a wall built out of the wave you just killed is cover with a shelf life.
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 — the frost upgrades make it. It's solid ground while it lasts, and it goes back to water wherever fire or lava reaches it.