Blasting robots is much more fun with friends - in a Strike Squad!
Commanders, report in for your 10th major update briefing - one primarily about friendship and sticking up for each other:
Your Mercs decided to speak up and show face, finally. They will guide you through the game with some unique personality while steadily helping you rescue and recruit new members, construct special rooms, acquire powerful gear, and - of course - stick it to M.E.G.A. Corp.!
And because camaraderie is a virtue, your engineers upgraded your clone-control stations with some additional seats for your friends to join the fight. Just hand them the controller and they can jump in at any time to take over any Merc in your squad.
It even works via Steam Remote Play Together!
If you still need some convincing arguments, check out the new & improved free demo for Survivor Mercs. Share it with your friends or check it our yourself if you don't have the full game yet. It is offering the initial game experience with limited content, and allows you to continue playing with your savegame in the full version.
Apart from these 3 highlights - Story Missions, Hotseat Coop, Free Demo - this update offers many more improvements and new content. Continue reading for the details, but first:
⚠ SAVEGAME NOTICE ⚠
Savegame Reset: OPTIONAL, BUT RECOMMENDED
This update introduces many changes to the progression and adds some new content.
If you continue playing with your existing savegame, you are very likely missing out on a lot of the new content but all existing savegames should be fully compatible.
We still display the warning to ask you about resetting your savegame!
By doing so, you will start fresh and a backup of your last savegame is automatically created in your local game folder.
You can find a guide on how to restore savegames from older game versions here:
How to access & restore savegame backups (Steam Forums)
Now, on to the details of update 0.10.0 "Strike Squad":
Story Missions & Progression Changes
The most notable change of this update - apart from parts of the UI - are the Story Missions.
Nearly all of your progression and primary unlocks are now tied to different missions framed by the Mercs and Conduit in a similar fashion as the Boss dialogues appeared before.
The mission have different objectives and goals, partially also very different from what you may remember from the last versions. The new Payload mission stages are particularly interesting, as they introduce a new type of objectives mechanic in our pursuit to make the map stages more varied and fun.
We want to note that the missions and new objectives are just the first step here. We have some additional improvements in the works, specifically around the game flow around the Payload stages and the presentation of the missions.
We aim to ship another smaller update soon that is polishing the missions further.
While you're mapping your route in the map overview, you will notice the particular stages that are relevant to the current mission(s).
Since they don't show all of the necessary info at all times, you will find the new Briefing Room in the Bunker, listing all currently active missions.
Aside from the Maps & Mercs, most of the Gear, Weapons, and also the Rooms are now tied to missions. Particularly the UI around the Rooms is still a bit lacking, but we hope that in general the missions break the monotony of the resource grind in favor of a slightly more guided experience with some fun interludes.
If you just start out (or anew), you will find less Mercs and Room blueprints at your initial disposal. In turn, the M.E.G.A. Corp. Test Sites became a more interesting location with a miniboss and more stages to host the first set of mission goals.
The Genome Lab and some later-stage Rooms are now also part of the rewards, but for the more expensive upgrades you should by then already have some loot to spend.
Couch Coop
The second huge highlight of update "Strike Squad" is the patron of its name - the hotseat couch coop mode for up to 4 players!
It's as easy as it can get to enjoy some operations with your friends. Just pick your main input device for the Commander, e.g. your mouse & keyboard, and hand any additional controllers to your friends.
As soon as you start an operator and got your first Merc, any player can just press start to join the action and control any Merc.
We will be posting a more detailed coop guide here shortly after this update is live.
You, the Commander, still control the action and decide the direction and which objectives to capture. The Mercs are able to move around freely on screen, dash into the enemies, and directly control the twin-stick action with the chosen Merc's weapon.
The game and coop mode are now supporting all common controllers. And - drum-roll - you can play even with friends online via Steam Remote Play Together.
The best thing: only the host, i.e. the Commander, needs to buy the game.
But we appreciate if you support us by buying the game, too, or gifting it to your friends ❤️
You will likely find some fun things to do in coop, so just give it a try and let us know what you think. The coop guide will try and list all the controls and details - stay tuned.
New Demo
If you watched the new trailer on our store page or followed us more closely, you may have heard that we're looking to leave Early Access this summer!
While the game is not finished - yet - we are happy to announce that we're launching a new demo for the game with this update.
We would greatly appreciate it, if you shared it with your friends or communities, and if you left a positive review. The demo has its own Steam page and we hope it helps the game reach more Commanders to join our cause!
The demo offers the full early game experience on the first two maps and allows you to unlock a few things along the way.
The savegame is fully compatible with the full version and once you buy it, you can continue directly where you left off. But apart from the limited content, you can enjoy the demo for as long as you like!
And of course the demo will be updated alongside the full game.
New Weapons & Dashes
This update also offers some additional new toys for the battlefield.
Your Commander can now also wield a Flamethrower, and we changed some Traits to enable special Dashes, leaving a burning trail, some toxic gas (yes it's farts), or siphoning HP from your enemies. These things are still WIP and there are already a few more Weapons lined up.
But we don't want to break savegame compatibility - even if we recommend a reset - so we chose to tie the Dashes to the existing Traits: flatulent, blazing, and vampiric. This will most likely already change with the upcoming patch update, and these Dashes and Traits will move into the Class category to prevent the different Dashes from conflicting.
UI & UX Improvements
Apart from many new effects and animations, you will hopefully enjoy the improved navigation and separation of some menus for clarity. This is an ongoing effort, and we really love your feedback to help us further improve.
In this update, you will find the Gear and Weapons separated into the Depot and Armory rooms respectively. In addition, the map selection and operation selection are also split in two consecutive menus, de-cluttering one of the most overwhelming menus.
The de-cluttering is also noticeable in some other menus, e.g. the Pause screen or some of the upgrade and informational screens like the end-of-battle summaries.
In some areas we added more elements like helpful descriptions, or more visually distinct upgrade cards. In others we are still working on improvements, especially for these 3 things:
- show more details about the secondary effects of Base Stat upgrades
- show the base stats for Gear, Mercs, and Weapons in their skill trees
- replace the camera cutscenes for objective highlights with a fundamentally better system
The goal is to improve that already with the upcoming patch update.
More Additions, Fixes, Adjustments, Improvements & Details
As always, there are many more improvements, changes, and fixes:
- Reduced number of enemies spawning on Danger Level 2 to make initial operation less brutal.
- Adjusted number of objectives spawning in various stages to make it easier to capture most of them.
- Gear items can no longer be upgraded, instead they roll in various rarities. Not all Gear has been adjusted to reflect the new synergies for them (see known issues).
- Complications are no longer a choice - each one can appear randomly and will impact your strategy for the current operation. In turn, we aim to introduce Advantages as "counters" soon.
- Reduced timing for barrage at end of stage and increased time on map slightly for multiple stages.
- Added a "shield" effect to bosses to show when they are invulnerable during phase changes.
- Improved the aiming indicators and attack indicators for both Commander, Mercs, and enemies.
- Fixed an issue where multiple simultaneous animations could put the game in a locked state (could normally be un-locked with random inputs).
- Fixed various instances of unnecessary auto-scrolling in UI.
- Added a much nicer loading screen between stages and bunker.
- Added many new animations and VFX to menus.
- Fixed some missing or broken sound FX.
- Fixed various cases where input could not register correctly.
- Made camera cutscenes snappier until they can be replaced.
There is much more under the hood, but we'll reveal that with the next patches to fix some of these...
Known Issues
- Stats don't show up in skill trees when looking at the node for your current level.
- Base Stat Upgrades don't show their secondary effects (yet).
- GriftLift may sometimes not take damage from certain Mercs (investigating).
- Locked Rooms don't show their unlock condition like other things do.
- New Dashes are still hooked up to Traits that could cause conflicts with other Traits.
- Map & Operation modifiers can stack too many negative things together with Complications, will be addressed in next patch.
- Not all Gear uses the newly defined synergy stats to scale more noticeable with Base Stats.
What's Next?
"Strike Squad" is major Early Access update #10 for Survivor Mercs.
It brings a lot of changes both over and under the hood. Please report any issues or bugs you encounter to help us fix these as quickly as possible.
We are already working on a patch update with additional balancing improvements and adjustments to synergies, as well as showing more detailed stat upgrade information. Also, we had plans to already include more settings, especially for input remapping, but this still needs a bit more work, but should be done soon.
As we are approaching the v1.0 release, we will release more smaller updates now. So please "Follow" the game to be notified when the news drop.
Our plans for these upcoming updates include:
⏩ doubling-down on the new Map & Operations structure to provide even more varied runs, new Objectives, and less randomness while squad-building
⏩ further refinements for UI & HUD to improve action readability and immersion
⏩ deeper gameplay and improved replayability by refining squad-builds & synergies and expanding the number of challenges and procedural generators for the maps & operations
⏩ better performance while improving enemy & Merc AI behavior
⏩ settings for input mapping and other accessibility options.
And, of course, we will continue to work on more content along with these features.
Commanders, we are truly grateful for every one of you who supports us with feedback and input during Early Access.
Please don't forget that the game is still under development. All your feedback helps us make a better game and iron out some of the remaining rough edges, imbalance, and bugs!
We hope this update gets you as excited as we are for the future. We are dedicated to listening to you and building Survivor Mercs into an outstanding game. Please, help us grow the community with a positive review and get involved in the development by participating in our community projects, and sharing your feedback, insights, and ideas on our Discord server (or the game's Steam forums).
Let's continue making a great game, together ❤
Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!
