New
- Optional manual aiming. In Options → Aiming you can swap the usual auto-attack for directional aiming: aim with the cursor and hold left click, or use the right stick and right trigger on a controller. Stop holding and you stop shooting. Auto-aim remains the default and the balance reference — manual is an addition, not a replacement.
- Per-class weapon tiers. Each class upgrades its weapon through 4 tiers with Renown — Starter, Bronze, Steel and Gold — up to +40% damage. The tier shows on the weapon you carry.
- Inferno difficulty. A fourth step above Nightmare, with mutators that change how you play, not just bigger numbers.
- Three new defenses: stone wall, brazier and frost totem.
- Move placed defenses for a fraction of their cost.
- Pick defenses at a distance. No need to stand next to them: cycle with the D-pad on a controller, or right-click them with the mouse. The selected one glows and shows what you can do to it: repair, move or sell.
- Three new wave events.
- Run recap. When a run ends, a panel lists the upgrades you took in that run, in the order you took them, instead of opening the full compendium from the main menu.
- Accessible color mode, in Options.
- 18 achievements, all of them now obtainable.
Progression balance
This is the change you will feel most, and it is deliberate. Renown came in so fast that a single victory unlocked the entire defense system without you even trying. Both ends were adjusted:
- All six defenses cost more: between 45% and 60% more than before. A first win now buys one or two, not all of them.
- You earn less Renown per run: a full victory on Normal drops from 190 to 135, and one-time objectives drop from 380 to 235 in total.
- More time between waves: from 8 to 14 seconds. Repairing is now limited to that window, so it had to be long enough to matter.
On Normal, unlocking all six defenses now takes around 8 victories. Higher difficulties pay considerably better: 5 on Hard, 4 on Nightmare, 3 on Inferno.
If you were already playing, the game will offer you a one-time fresh start when you open it. Nothing is deleted on its own: it is a recommendation, not a wipe. It mostly matters if you had already unlocked all six defenses, since otherwise you will never see the new pacing.
Interface
- Custom mouse cursor. The game drops the generic system pointer, and switches to a reticle while manual aiming is on.
- Pick your reticle color. In manual aiming the reticle can be gold, white, cyan, magenta or red. Same shape, different color: the gold one got lost against dirt paths and stone.
- The reticle now glows. A soft halo behind the shape, so you never lose track of it on the map — least of all in Act II, when night falls and torches are the only thing lighting the place.
- New map selection thumbnails. The old ones were taken before the maps had their current houses and scenery, so they showed a place that no longer exists.
- Menus adapt to the screen. At high interface scale the main menu switches to two columns instead of pushing buttons off-screen, and returns to one column when you scale back down.
- The upgrade compendium is now two columns with tighter entries: the text that repeated itself is gone.
- Dropdowns and scrollbars drop the system grey and use the same wood and gold as the rest of the interface.
- Proper typography. The game drops the engine default font: Alegreya for text, Metamorphous for titles and buttons.
- All interface text is 20% larger.
- Controller buttons are drawn as icons instead of written out.
- In-run character stats: damage, attack speed, range and move speed.
- Compact upgrade cards: name, stack and a one-line effect, with the full text in a separate panel. Levelling up used to be a wall of text, and boss rewards said nothing at all.
- Clearer tower projectiles, and attack speed is shown in hits per second instead of a raw cooldown.
- Defense and enemy health switches to notches, and defenses only show it when they are damaged.
- The selected defense explains what it does and what it costs.
- Important notices stop the wave clock so you can read them.
- Towers show their range while building, and keep it faintly visible once placed.
- Torches and fire now have a subtle glow.
- The logo looked grainy when scaled down, and icons and frames had a white halo around their edges. Both fixed.
Fixes
- The "Class training" act reward sometimes granted nothing at all. It now always grants an upgrade and names it before you choose.
- Defenses could be repaired endlessly during a wave, making them immortal. Repairing is now limited to the window between waves.
- Two event effects (experience bonus and fragile defenses) never applied.
- Enemies piled up chasing the player above the intended cap.
- Enemies hit the inn from far too far away — up to 70 pixels of thin air — and the same went for your defenses. They now have to be right next to them.
- Ranged enemies shot through walls, and could get stuck doing it forever. They now need line of sight, and reposition without it.
- The Mage twin projectile aimed at nothing and spawned on top of the main one.
- The Mage explosion dealt full damage across the whole radius; it now falls off with distance.
- On a controller, clicking the right stick sold a defense by accident — the same stick that moves the build cursor.
- Opening the upgrade menu opened the detail panel on its own.
- Several notices drew on top of each other when closing an act or levelling up.
- The player could get stuck against the inn. The inn shared a collision layer with your defenses; it now has its own.
- Selling a defense left its info card stranded on screen.
- The wave panel was clipped whenever an event was active: the enemy count line was cut off by the border.
- Maxing out the interface scale could lock you out, with the Options buttons pushed off-screen. The change now reverts on its own after 10 seconds if you do not confirm it.
- Some enemies went completely inert, neither moving nor attacking even with you standing next to them.
- Closing the game now saves your settings and progression. Anything you had already earned was saved anyway — at the end of each run, and whenever you completed a challenge or killed a boss — but closing the window did not save on its own. It does now.
- One story line was cut short by an unquoted comma.
- Readability fixes: boss health bar far from its sprite, duplicated level in the HUD, duplicated epic relic, clipped text and a build bar with the wrong width.