Demo Update v0.51.0 Alpha
This is the largest update Hellrifters has had. Two months of work, and it lands on the parts of the game you spend the most time with: the campaign has an ending you can actually reach, levels breathe between pushes, and your aim steers the squad's fire in every mode instead of only in Directional.
Here is everything new since v0.41.0.
A note before you read on: this is not the final progression design for the campaign. What the demo runs on now is a directional version, built so the sealing loop is something you can play through from end to end rather than read about. It hands you the Cores and Shards along a fixed route of phases. Where this is going is a campaign that lets you choose your own: you decide which missions to take on and gather the Cores and Shards a Rift demands from wherever you prefer to earn them, instead of following one prescribed path. Rift counts, sealing thresholds and unlock order will move with that.
A Rift you can actually close
The campaign now has a spine. A Rift is closed by meeting its seal requirements, Rift Cores and Rift Shards, and closing it is the only thing that opens the next one. Rift 2 used to swing open halfway through Rift 1, before you had done anything about the breach you were standing in. Not anymore.
A core objective every phase. Each campaign phase carries a mission your Rift Core depends on, for example "Locate 3 Hellpump Sites". It is announced at the start of the level with its reward and its HUD marker, and it stays on the HUD for the whole run with a progress bar so you always know how close the Core is.
Sealing Rift 1 is within reach. The seal asks for 5 Rift Cores and 10 Rift Shards, thresholds that fit inside the phases you can play right now, so the whole loop can be seen through to the end.
Tag three goals instead of two. Both in mission selection and on the in-run objectives screen. More goals tracked per run means more Shards earned per run.
An epic payoff. Completing a phase's core operation sets off a shockwave from your squad that critically bursts every regular enemy on the field into pieces, with a camera punch-in, a screen flash and its own sting. Bosses shrug it off. Completing a Shard goal now sets off a smaller version of the same thing.
Sealing Rift 1 earns you a word from the General. He is not a man who congratulates lightly, and he has read the word "sealed" off a report four times in his whole career. He also has news: the Helldiggers have marked a second Site, deeper than the first, and the ones who found it came back quiet.
The General briefs both missions
The briefing screen now covers a phase's core operation and its Shard work, rolling in beside the General as he arrives, showing the first drawing and then swapping to the second. Phase 3 is also where he finally tells you who has been doing all the drawing. Two missions, two of the lad's illustrations, and both briefings run shorter than the old single-mission ones did. Briefings remember what you have already been told, so a mission type you have seen before quietly drops out of later ones.
General Bishop also has a new voice. Every cue he had, arriving, mumbling through a page, walking off, was one recording that played identically every time. Each is now a set of takes picked at random, and he trails off at the end of a page with a closing grunt instead of being cut mid-syllable.
The Devil's Deals
He has new offers, and the old ones now change how a run plays instead of nudging a number you cannot feel.
Reanimator. Every kill pays double Slay Points, because the Devil intends to sell you the same hog twice. Every corpse you leave intact gets back up and rejoins the fight, greyed, half again as fast, on half health. Kill it again and it rises faster still on a quarter health. No hog rises a third time. What is walking is easy to pick out: it lurches, it groans in a register no living hog can reach, and it leaves blood behind it as it comes for you. Anything you blow to pieces stays down, so a critical kill is now a decision rather than a bonus.
Overpenetration. Your bullets stop dying on the first hog they hit and punch through the one behind it, and the one behind that. The price is a magazine half the size, so you are reloading in the middle of the lines you just lined up. Destroyable cover still stops a round.
Soul Sale is now his biggest offer instead of his dullest. Take it and the upgrade shop opens on the spot: pick a category and the Devil takes it all the way to Mastery for nothing, and he does not care that Mastery normally wants three synergy points first. The shop favours categories you have barely touched. His price went up to match: every enemy carries 50% more health for the rest of the run.
Rebalanced deals. Bleed for Power trades half your max health for +50% weapon damage. Slow Your Roll drags every enemy to -30% movement speed but doubles your ability recharge time, so you survive it by moving rather than by pressing buttons. Bulk Discount takes -30% off enemy health. Speed Demon doubles your squad's movement speed and takes 65% of your max HP.
You can say no, and he remembers. Refusing a deal no longer ends the matter: he comes back later if you keep dominating. Each refusal in a row makes him wait longer, and he returns with his own, less patient lines. Refusing also puts Dominance tracking on hold for a while so the meter cannot immediately shove him back in front of you.
His pickup no longer waits forever. It stays collectable for 30 seconds and blinks faster and faster over its last 8. Walking past it counts the same as turning him down.
Dominance in three metals
Dominance Stars now come in bronze, silver and gold depending on the difficulty you earned them on. Recruit gives bronze, Soldier silver, Elite gold. Each of the five star slots keeps its own metal, so clearing three stars on Elite upgrades the first three slots and leaves the rest as they were. Nothing you already earned is lost: existing stars get their metal retroactively, and the difficulty buttons are coloured to match so you can see what a run is worth before you start it.
The campaign Dominance percentage now counts metal rather than stars, so clearing the campaign on Recruit reads 33% and only Elite reaches 100%. Dominance Stars also finally show up in the Arena menu, where each arena keeps its own row.
The meter itself changed too. It no longer bleeds away over time, which used to demand roughly one and a half kills every second just to stand still. Now it only drops when your squad takes damage. And it recognises evasion, not just slaughter: keep your squad untouched for 20 seconds and the meter starts filling on its own, turning blue while the streak feeds it. Any hit resets it.
Levels that breathe
Every stretch of pressure in a campaign level is now followed by a real lull. The enemy count drops to roughly a sixth of a peak, only the weakest chaff keeps coming, and nothing shoots at you from range. It is a window to finish off stragglers, sweep up the gems you had to run past, take your level up and walk to your objective before the next push builds.
Each three minute stretch runs push, lull, push, lull, push, lull, climax instead of one long climb, and each stretch builds to a single climax instead of two so the peaks land harder.
Enemy pacing across a full run was rebuilt: 34 pacing stages instead of 20. The quiet floor stays the same all run while the peaks keep climbing, so getting stronger actually shows.
Waves grow with the campaign. The opening minutes of a long mission no longer play out identically to the short ones. The deeper the mission, the more its early stretches are seasoned with enemies you first met later.
Each stretch has a flavour, an enemy type colouring every third reinforcement wave, so a stretch has a recognizable character instead of a generic crowd.
Strikes waves. A tight pack of a single enemy type sweeping in from one direction as a readable, dodgeable event. They come in pairs, and some now arrive as a wedge rather than encircling you, so you can turn to meet it or pull away. Losing squadmates used to mean the game hit hardest exactly when you were weakest. Assaults now fall off steeply as the squad thins, since a concentrated strike is the one thing a lone survivor cannot split with anyone.
Nothing in that layer is rolled at random. Which enemies a stretch carries, when a strike lands and what it is made of are all authored, so a rift keeps its shape from run to run and can be learned. What varies is where they come at you from, and how hard they push, which follows your difficulty and how much of your squad is still standing.
Running away works less well. Reinforcements arrive weighted toward the side you are heading for, and enemies that fall behind are brought back around rather than quietly deleted.
Difficulty that actually differs
The three settings were separated by about 2x on paper but only 1.7x in practice, which on a solo run made Recruit and Elite play almost the same. Standing enemy counts now differ by about 3x between the easiest and hardest setting, wave timing was widened, and the field refills to a different depth per setting: on Recruit it is allowed to genuinely empty out, on Elite it barely gets the chance.
Recruit difficulty sends more enemies than it did, but softer ones. Thinning the crowd had made the easiest setting feel empty rather than easy, so it now matches Soldier fairly closely for ordinary chaff and separates itself where it counts: smaller scripted waves, much smaller targeted assaults, longer lulls and slower wave timing.
Two things stay deliberately the same on every difficulty. Enemy health, damage and speed do not change, so a Deathslug takes the same number of shots whichever setting you play and what you learn on one difficulty carries to the next. And level-up upgrades are now worth exactly the same everywhere: they used to be quietly boosted 20% on Recruit and cut 20% on Elite, so a card reading "+10% damage" was not telling you the same thing on two different runs.
Three ways to aim, all at once
Shoot mode selection is back in Options: Auto: (the squad fires at any target in range), Directional: (they fire toward where you aim) and Manual: (pure twin-stick fire button). Auto is the new default for a more effortless baseline.
More importantly, aiming now means something in Auto. Nudge the stick or the mouse and the squad narrows its fire into the direction you are pointing. Hold the trigger as well and the whole squad focuses on the reticle itself. Let go and they go back to picking their own targets. All three firing styles are available at once without changing a setting.
Your leader's spotlight shows what the squad is shooting at. When you are not steering the aim yourself the beam swings onto the leader's current target and follows it, quickly enough to feel deliberate but not so fast that it flicks between enemies. With nothing to shoot it settles a short way ahead of you along the direction you are walking. Touching the aim takes it back instantly.
With a mouse, the crosshair sits on a ring around your squad while the light follows the pointer, and snaps out onto the light when you hold fire. Aiming and committing to a shot now look like different things.
Holding fire on a gamepad now aims like a mouse. The stick drives the crosshair's speed rather than its absolute direction, so a small tilt nudges it a little and it stays where you left it. Previously a slight roll of your thumb could swing the crosshair right across the ring.
With Auto on and nothing to shoot at, your squad and their weapons turn to face the way you are steering instead of staring at wherever the cursor was last left.
A whole run is playable with one hand
The real reason for this one is not accessibility, though it helps there too. It is that a run should not wear you out. Steering with one hand while aiming with the other and hammering a trigger is a lot of input to keep up for half an hour, and the tiredness creeps in long before you notice it in your play. With everything reachable from the movement cluster, a long session sits lighter: you are making decisions about where the squad goes and what it fires at, not juggling four inputs at once to express them. It also means one-handed play is a genuine option, and that you never have to reach for the mouse.
The same goes for a gamepad. In the default Auto fire mode you can run a whole mission on the left stick alone: the squad picks its own targets, turns to face the way you are steering when there is nothing to shoot, and the left stick also places your ability reticle. The right stick is there the moment you want to point the squad somewhere specific, and it takes over instantly when you touch it.
Nothing is taken away if that is not you: keep the mouse or the right stick and play it as a twin-stick shooter, aim the squad yourself and pull the trigger in Manual mode. Both are real ways to play the same run now, not one supported setup and one compromise.
Special abilities can be triggered with Space as well as right click, and WASD steers the aiming reticle while an ability is lined up. Move the mouse at any point and it takes over instantly, then hands back a second after you stop.
The level-up screen, the Devil's bargains, the game over screen, the Rift Status screen, the reward pick and the Game Modes menu can all now be navigated from the keyboard.
Ability cycling and manual reload have keys next to both the WASD cluster and the alternative (P, L, Ö, Ä) cluster (O and Å to cycle, ¨ to reload), plus the numpad. Menus accept the alternative cluster too.
Tutorial prompts show the keys for the movement cluster you actually use, and prompts that asked for a left click can be cleared with Space.
Keyboard ability aiming starts at your character rather than wherever the cursor was left, and a direction you are already holding steers it straight away.
Ability aiming is cancelled with Shift on the keyboard. Esc goes straight to pause.
Abilities and modules
Using an ability hands you the next ready one automatically**, moving right along your squad and wrapping around, so you can fire several off in a row without browsing between each one. If nobody else is ready, the selection stays where it is and comes back the moment its cooldown ends.
Ability slow-mo now works whichever way you browse, and browsing is cancelled by moving as well as by firing.
Orbiting Blasters punch straight through every enemy they touch, and each shot swells into a growing orb as it travels, hitting harder and covering more ground the further it flies. Late in its flight a single round can plough through a whole column.
Buzzsaws build to a climax. Each cycle starts at a low grind and winds up over the whole window, blades howling higher and throwing off an ever thicker trail of sparks, until they hit a top speed two and a half times what it was.
Decoy is no longer just a distraction. Demons lured by it take bonus damage from every source, from +20% at Mk I up to double damage at Mk V.
Deathball no longer harms your own squad, and hunts on its own when you are not aiming: it picks a nearby target, prefers a route that does not run through your squad, and steers around your characters.
Trooper's Bulldozer launches where the character is actually aiming when you are not steering the aim yourself, and can be aimed one-handed with a smooth indicator instead of snapping between eight fixed directions.
Scout's and Trooper's shields swing to face the way you are moving whenever you are not actively aiming.
Explosions, gore and Hellpumps
Explosions can now land critical hits. Grenades, rockets, mines, drone missiles, TNT and nukes all roll for crits, so blasts hit harder and tear enemies apart more often.
Explosions now knockbacks enemies. Blasts finally apply their knockback, so grenades and rockets send bodies sliding instead of dropping them where they stood. Nukes hit hardest, ice and stun grenades leave targets in place.
Rocket blasts use the Rocket Launcher's own damage, crit and knockback stats, and every upgrade and module that boosts those carries through to the explosion. Shockwaves also expand more than three times faster, so kills land with the fireball instead of trailing behind it.
Super Magnet and Body Pinball finally work together. A charged piece now leaves its blast at the point of impact and keeps skimming, dropping another explosion on every enemy it clatters into. The charge is contagious: one live piece lights up the next, and a single kick can send a line of ordnance ricocheting through the crowd.
Hellpumps are a limited resource now. Destroying one no longer spawns a replacement, so a map holds exactly as many as the objective asks for. Hellshrines are unchanged and still keep coming, which makes them an endless income stream you pay for with a fight while a Hellpump is a finite one off.
Finding a Hellpump site pays out on the spot, with a mega XP gem sitting in the open at the site. It is not pulled in by your magnet, so someone has to walk over it. Active sites also pulse: the sigil burned into the ground glows and breathes until you take the site, then stays behind as a scar.
Replaying a cleared phase is no longer an empty field. The Hellpumps come back, spawned across the map at once, untracked and unrewarded, marked with a short range radar arrow. A phase whose objective was locating sites gives you sites again rather than turning into a destroy mission. It is a treasure hunt rather than a mission.
Blowing up a Hellpump or a Hellploder no longer wipes your squad. Their blasts still level everything hostile nearby, but the shockwave costs a hog at most 20 health, so standing too close is a mistake you can learn from.
Progression and XP
Basic upgrades now stack additively. Two +25% picks give +50% rather than compounding, keeping stat growth readable. Health, armor, ammo capacity and magazine size stack on repeated picks too, and cooldown and resistance reductions have floors so they can never hit zero.
The level-up menu shows your accumulated power per category, for example "Current Upgrade Power: +45%".
Synergizer rework. Synergizer I / II / III now boost 1 / 2 / 3 random categories, instead of every tier boosting 3 and feeling identical.
Regeneration upgrades stop appearing in the pool once a squad has stacked enough of them, so regen can no longer snowball into immortality.
The XP economy was retuned. Mega gems and endless Hellshrines had pushed a good run up to eight Main Levels, which made meta progression a formality. Shard and Core XP was cut roughly in half, and Main Levels cost about four times as much, so an early run still hands you several levels while later ones settle around one per run. Levels you already earned are untouched.
The meta menu top bar shows your Rift Core and Rift Shard balance, and the Mastery Bonus shown on the game over screen is now actually paid into your Main Level. Six Masteries in a run is 6000 XP.
Kicking the gore finally counts for something. Three achievements now pay XP for it: Punt Master for pieces kicked, Corpse Cannon for kills made with kicked body pieces and Rock Bottom for kills made with kicked rock pieces. Each has three tiers that build up across runs. Two of the three had never been earnable at all before this update, because the kill was only credited if the piece had never been kicked in the first place.
Progression no longer requires completing secondary goals. Advancing depends only on the main survival goal, on existing saves as well as new ones.
Quality of life
Squad Selection remembers your last squad for the rest of the session, characters and order. Campaign and Battle Arena share one squad, Quick Demo keeps its own, and quitting clears it.
The Shooting Mode panel in Squad Selection shows your actual setting and lets you cycle it right before entering a rift, instead of always reading "Auto". Options and Squad Selection now update each other immediately.
Gamepad aiming got a lot more headroom. Aiming while firing is about three times faster at 100% sensitivity than it was, fast enough to cross the whole aiming range in a quarter of a second, while a light tilt still creeps for fine adjustments. Stick deadzones came back down to 10% so small movements register.
Unbranded controllers get sensible prompts. Any pad that is not Xbox or PlayStation now gets brand-neutral prompts like "DOWN BTN" and "LEFT STICK". Switch pads benefit most: their A sits where Xbox has B, so the old prompts pointed at the wrong button.
Worn controllers cope better in menus: a stick that no longer centres itself does nothing until it returns to centre, the deadzone setting applies to menu navigation, and the left stick moves the selection one step at a time in one direction.
Locked characters you can actually afford now pulse in the Characters menu, so "unlockable right now" reads at a glance.
Music is noticeably louder overall (the volume setting was being applied twice, and the muffle over level-up, pause and event screens now fades smoothly instead of snapping.
Battle Arena spawns roughly half as many Skullcrawlers, with the freed slots going to grunts early and armored grunts in the late blitz stage.
The in-game controls panel now lists Aim, and "Reset Progress" uses the game's own popup with cancel selected by default.
A note on old saves
The campaign, progression and balance changed enough this update that an old save no longer matches the game. On your first launch you may get a one time prompt recommending a fresh start so the new content unlocks in the order it was designed. Keeping your old save is always an option, and the reset stays available in Options either way. New players never see it.
Old saves that had Rift 2 opened by the previous rule have it closed again, unless you had already deployed there.
Bug fixes
Fixed a crash on the loading screen when pressing a movement or menu key during shader warmup, and a crash in Squad Selection after finishing a run.
Fixed pistols getting stuck reloading after every single shot for a hog that arrived while a Devil's Deal was active or after a magazine upgrade.
Fixed a solo run turning co-op looking after squad deaths, complete with a yellow player two crosshair and a duplicate ability row.
Fixed the breathing room built into campaign levels almost never happening, and a boss spawning nine seconds into the recovery stretch after the previous boss fight.
Fixed enemies briefly stopping arriving after a run of messy kills. Enemies blown to pieces were counted twice in the live tally, so the game believed the field was fuller than it was.
Fixed critical kills counting twice toward every tracked statistic, which made goals like "get 100 critical kills" fill at half the work they asked for.
Fixed speed, agility, weapon handling, dodge, ability cooldown and damage resistance upgrades being wiped mid-run or silently doing nothing on a repeated pick, and characters spawning later in a run not inheriting them.
Fixed the Orbiting Blaster upgrades never reaching the projectiles, so Blaster Master and Multi Bullets were silently thrown away.
Fixed weapons whose bullets gain damage over distance losing the whole build-up when a bullet pierced, and the bonus being rounded away every frame.
Fixed a long list of Devil's Deal bugs: Cooldown from Hell doing nothing to an existing squad, Bare Skin giving your armor back on an armor upgrade, Bleed for Power and Bare Skin skipping abilities, sentries, airstrikes and grenades, Speed Demon being wiped by any weapon swap, and max HP penalties vanishing on the next health upgrade.
Fixed Dominance Stars being recorded under the wrong difficulty when you changed difficulty after picking a level, showing the wrong metal during a run, surviving a progression reset, and the game over screen showing only the stars from the run that just ended.
Fixed Scout's Bulwark Shield starting its duration countdown while on cooldown after a duration upgrade, which left it popping in and vanishing after a second.
Fixed overlapping explosions inflating each other's blast radius, so a distant Hellploder could suddenly reach and kill your squad.
Fixed rocket and grenade kills looking like two deaths, and burst-moving enemies animating at a stroll regardless of their actual speed.
Fixed achievement and task completion XP being displayed on the end screen but never granted, and task XP leaking from a previous run into the next one.
Fixed perk points earned from upgrading a character not showing in the Perks menu until you reselected the character, which also made the perks you had just paid for unbuyable.
Fixed a large batch of controller navigation problems: selections jumping to unrelated buttons in scrolling menus, tutorial prompts letting the selection wander off, and the General's briefing letting a gamepad walk into the phase buttons behind it.
Fixed the crosshair appearing during the first seconds of a level in auto fire, fading out while the fire button was held, or staying on screen permanently on a gamepad.
Fixed a Rift Core objective you had already completed starting over when you replayed that phase.
Fixed the game freezing after a victory if a slow-motion highlight was active at the moment the run was won.
Fixed the General's Rift sealing speech reading "Sealed, {rank}" with the placeholder showing instead of your title, and "Shrads" where it should say "Shards".
Thanks for playing. The in-game feedback panel (F11) goes straight to me, and this update is shaped by a lot of what came through it.
Whether you survive or fall, Hell remembers.