Cubed and Dangerous is back! Also, on sale in the Spring Sale so tell your friends!
For new and returning players, there are a lot of changes that have been made over the last week or two to really improve the cubed and dangerous experience. If you've played before or you're thinking of checking it out now, it's a great time!
Steam Achievements
Cubed and Dangerous now has Steam Achievements! There are 15 in the game now, and a whole new set coming in the next couple of days. The achievements that have been added so far provide some additional challenges around campaign completion, end game content, some fun build-arounds to try, and other replayability focus areas.
Some of these were in the old built in achievement system in the game, but are now fully exposed to Steam. Hopefully in the future the game will be approved for profile inclusion so you can add achievements from the game there as well, fingers crossed!
Difficulty Curve Adjustments
There's been a larger focus this time around on early game difficulty, new player onboarding and generally ramping down some of the surprise run-end situations that used to arise. There have been a lot of changes in this area so here's a summary list:
- Reduce enemy bullet speed to improve dodging and maneuverability during gameplay
- Re-balance enemy health across the board for more satisfying run-and-gun interactions (bosses included)
- Improve invincibility frames on hit for better recovery, making intense situations more manageable
- Fix issues with friendly-fire from barrels and mission objective explosions
- Add more gear drops to early levels, and improving risk-reward for taking on harder (skulled) missions
The barrel explosions and mission objectives were interestingly the number 1 cause of early run ending events from playtesting. The friendly fire was so high, it made it difficulty to maneuver in large firefights while still avoiding barrels. To make this even worse, enemies could blow up the barrels so the interaction was beyond your control in many situations. The damage is still present, but has been significantly reduced (over 70% reduction on average). Now they operate much more closely to other level based traps, impacting pathing and providing additional challenge without feeling unfair.
Gameplay and Playstyle Options
Cubed and Dangerous was originally designed as a challenging twin stick shooter with heavy build-crafting and roguelike elements. The game remains true to this nature in design, but now has many options in the settings menu for players who are looking to tailor the experience in different directions.
In the settings menu you'll find options for:
Auto Fire Mode - This option will take over control of firing primary and secondary weapons for you. This will feel more like a survivor-like game (for those Vampire Survivors / Brotato fans), it will auto aim and fire at nearest enemies. Your tactical weapon (ultimate: Right bumper on gamepad, Q key on keyboard) is still a manual fire, as the ammo is often limited and needs to be deployed tactically in most situations.
Link Fire Buttons - This option links primary and secondary fire buttons together, so pressing either button will result in firing both weapons simultaneously. This reduces the need to hold multiple triggers while playing, or if using the mouse only requires a single button click. This one is a nice stopgap for those who want to still aim and control the twin stick combat, but are having trouble keeping up with firing both weapons.
These two options do alter some balance in the game. Some weapons with lower ammo or energy costs can become more difficult to use if firing automatically, but you can also change the gameplay options at any time through the pause menu if you want to work around the issues with those weapons specifically.
Additionally, there are also some unlock bypass options if you want to get in and try out all the character classes without finishing the campaign a few times first. You can only access these buttons from the main menu (not the pause menu) because they will impact the current mission's loot rolls, and can have unintended consequences. You can find them in the "other" tab in the game settings:
Character Unlock - Unlocks all the locked character classes. You'll have instant access to all 14 (number 14 is my favorite) on character select when starting a new run. There's no way to undo this, other than deleting all of your save data and starting over completely. So if you enjoy the grind and exploration, don't click. But if you want maximum content immediately, enjoy!
Item Unlock - Unlocks all items in the game. This bypasses the unlock events for defeating act bosses, and will put all possible items into the item pool from the start. You'll still need to find and equip them to have them discovered in the collection, but will have maximum item variety in every run. Like the character unlock, this is also irreversible.
Pacing tweaks
Additionally, the total escalation timer pool has been increased for all levels (roughly 30% total time increase across the board) to allow for more leeway when taking on missions before the Enforcers show up and make things difficult for you. It's still intended for you to try to complete objectives as quickly as possible, so follow those objective arrows or minimap icons to get things completed quickly!
Heist level final timers have increased as well. Roughly 3 to 5 seconds additional time per generated room in the level. Heists were a little too difficult for new players in the early game, and when populations become very large in the late game the timer was still fairly limiting causing more surprising run ends.
Scout mission objectives (those radar dish installations) have had their total HP reduced by around 30%. Early game they were too bullet-spongy, which dragged the quick pacing of the game down a little. In the late game they scale with enemies, so they do become more difficult to take down while avoiding the defending squads. The goal with this change was to help make the early game feel more streamlined while gearing up.
Thanks everyone for the support so far, hope you have fun with the updates and get a chance to dive in! Still love to hear all your feedback, so hope in the Discord Channel to connect or drop any feedback and suggestions there. Additionally, you can email us or join the email list on The Ace High Arcade Website to stay up to date on updates for this and other games. Including announcements, giveaways, and more (email frequency less than 1 a month).