It’s been 5 long years since John Strong and his friends first started their fight to save the world. 5 long years since the game launched out of Early Access. In that time the game’s done pretty well for us, and even got ported to Xbox One and PS4 with some improvements. And the world has changed a lot too! Steam offers a lot more tools to devs, everyone’s stuck at home playing games all day (I mean working from home) and basically, the timing felt right for us to launch a big update!
Headlines:
- Achievement fixes!
- New mode!
- No online multiplayer mode, but fear not, Remote Play Together’s got your back!
Without boring you, we started work on this patch the moment we launched the game to Steam back in 2015. We had huge plans but things conspired against us. The game’s publisher went under within about 4 weeks of launch, and we never saw any of the money from that all-important launch window and had to take work for hire to survive - which meant that Tango got kinda left to flounder. It hurt us to do it, but the studio is more than just the game.
It’s INCREDIBLY cool to be back here now, after all this time, finally setting right some of the wrongs, rebalancing things, and fixing straight-up bugs that have annoyed us (and you!) for so long. So here’s the full list!
New Features:
Arcade Mode!
We wanted a mode that lets you get into the mad action as fast as possible, and that means few button presses, and no story to skip. Just you, your mates, your guns, and the forces of evil who need defeating!
- New mode that for 1-4 players
- Remixes all the elements from every World, including enemies, and throws them into the pot to mix up the challenge
- Only fight with 1 weapon and 1 throwable item!
- Keeps going on an endless loop, getting harder and harder over time
- 3 levels then a Boss structure still the same as the Story Mode
Here you can see the new loading screen, which shows your progress in the endless and increasingly difficult Arcade Mode.
Here's an example of the remixing - a Hunter bad guy in the beaches of Sea Shell?!
Killionaire Bossfight rework!
This really makes the whole fight a lot closer to how we wanted it originally, with each boss getting their time in the limelight, and the game being a lot more clear/fair feeling as a result.
The brand new HUD for Killionaire bosses shows you the status of every boss.
- We’ve made it so that the game shows you the roster of Bosses up front!
- It introduces them at sensible moments/depending on how you’re doing and how many players there are
- It labels the ones you’ve killed too, so you know how you’re doing.
Combat feedback!
- We’ve added health bars and damage numbers to every enemy, so combat is much easier to understand, and all the lovely feedback makes it a ton more fun too.
See those lovely numbers, all popping out of bad guys as you ruin their day!
Fixes & Changes:
- Achievements. One of the biggest complaints has been against our more… optimistic achievements, plus a couple that were broken. Well, they’re fixed and rebalanced! The even better news is a bunch of them will automatically update as complete if you’ve already met the criteria!
- All melee enemies now behave a little more fairly, they don’t all rush you, they hang back a little sometimes, and generally add a lot more interest to combat (doesn’t include Zombies, they’re still zombies!)
- Melee enemies in Killionaire no longer occasionally run backwards
- Rebinding controls now works 100% of the time, and the screen updates properly to reflect that.
- Rebalancing work has been done across the late game, so now the Killionaire and especially Bionic Cop worlds are much less difficult. Still tough, but not impossible.
- UPU Drones tagged as Special weren’t always dropping what they should. Now they always give you their swag bags!
- Added a ‘fullscreen windowed’ option for streamers etc
- Players could get into a situation where either speed was capped to ‘slowed’ (most easily by exploding off of a Cobweb tiles in a Ghoul Squad level) , and now that should never happen.
- Shooting the Matrix 80 should no longer affect game performance.
- Invisible Ghosts no longer collide with bullets.
- We couldn’t resist adding a knife graphic for when you melee attack!
- Background colours are now being set correctly in ‘out of bounds’ tiles
- Objective Arrows would point to dead Bosses… not any more!
- There was an invisible ‘ghost’ button on Level Complete screens. It’s been exorcised.
- Added discord and patreon links to the main menu
- Changed the seed for the Killionaire Boss Fight so it’s a much better arena now.
- Killionaire Bosses used to be able to attack the player during cinematics.
- LockJaw used to have 2 chainsaws. This seemed unfair :D
- Bosses now show damage taken on hits, just like the rest of the bad guys
- There’s a nice bit of polish on menu selections now, shiny flashes etc, from the Console port
- Credits entries have been fixed up/cleaned up
- Red-haired punks in Bionic cop has no legs… they’ve been given legs now.
- Sometimes the Pause Menu wouldn’t show default controls. Now it does.
- When using a mouse, the pointer renders as a crosshair ingame now.
- homing Rockets explosion sound has been fixed
- UPU Brain Drone now pushes enemies out of the way (stops multiple layering up)
- Old Ramishar now spawns mobs 100% of the time
- Choppers take proper damage from Grenades now
- Chopper bullets always travel at the correct speed now
- Aiming after reloading now respects your chosen direction
- Tweaked the layering/heights of HP bars and badges to help keep things clear on Special enemies.
- The Destroyed Computers objective was offset (as were a few other assets)
- Audio now restarts properly when navigating menus and the game.
- Let Off Some Steam splash now scales properly
- Settings are now properly (robustly) saved between sessions
- Several pooling issues fixed that were affecting presentation and performance.
- Audio settings no longer show anything other than whole numbers
- Choppers no longer have a chance to be given infinite health (and the really large health bars that went with it)
- There was this annoying single tile of goo, a corner tile, used in Bionic Cop. It used to animate slightly out of synch. NO LONGER.
- The Armoured Rocket Cop in Bionic Cop can no longer become invisible. It was an accident.
- Booting the game with a DS4 controller no longer results in the game becoming insufferable.
- Level load graphics now match their levels.
- No more Mastertronic logo. They were our publisher back in 2015 but went under… again in 2015.
- Added our new logo (it’s old now, but newer than the one in the game… you know what I mean!).
Other:
Removal of Online Multiplayer
We prepped for this when we dropped the RRP a while back, last time we hoped to update the game. But now it’s for real… made possible in part due to Remote Play Together which basically made our efforts a little redundant.
You can still play the game online, in co-op, with your mates - you just do it via Steam’s own inbuilt Remote Play Together feature - it’s just that we don’t have to maintain features and code specific to online play, and that makes our job a LOT easier moving forward. We understand if you feel a little surprised, but honestly it’s the best thing for the game. If you come across issues with RPT, let us know and we’ll see what we can do!
Known Issues:
We’re aware of lots of things, most of them small, but here are the bigger ones!
- layering of tiles is broken in the starting room of the Killionaire boss fight, as well as various other areas. We’re hoping to fix them all one day!
- Player guns sometimes float off-centre
Plans:
- We plan to release a DLC pack for Tango Fiesta soon, alongside some more fixes. News on that soon.
If you enjoy this update, or think maybe we're a bit mad for doing this after 5 long years, maybe you'd consider leaving us a review. It really helps us to get the game seen by more people, as well as impress anyone we're pitching more games to!
We'd also love to get you into our discord community, so please do pop over! We're on there all day every day.
