New Features

• Steam Achievements are now live, with a career-stats mirror and a local replay browser to rewatch your games.
• Pre-game intro sequence, goal lamp, and crowd reactions — the arena now cheers, groans, and lights up on goals.
• Offline penalty-shot drill — score X of 10 in a dedicated practice mode.
• Locked camera mode plus new tutorial prompts for shot elevation.

Gameplay & Feel

• Snap shots are quicker — reduced the quick-shot threshold so taps fire faster.
• Shot mechanics reworked — cleaner split between quick shots and charged shots, with more reliable, host-authoritative one-timers (including cross-seam feeds).
• Puck physics tuning — momentum-scaled bounces off the boards, better contested-puck scrambles (faceoffs / board battles), and a puck shadow for readability.
• Penalty shots feel better — running-start grace and eased momentum rules.

Bots & Goalies

• Added an Easy bot tier and pushed Normal further down from the Hard ceiling — a gentler ramp for new players.
• Added an Easy goalie tier and tuned free-play goalies.
• Smarter defense — each backline defender now picks up a distinct man to cover.

Fixes & Stability

• Crash guards for bad (non-finite) physics states and a network-process safety guard — fewer edge-case crashes.
• Tutorial goalie now stands in a proper open pose.
• Options panel stays open after hitting Apply.

Behind the scenes

• Network-quality telemetry with an F4 in-game lag-flag button, plus audio bus cleanup for crowd sounds.