YOUR FRAME IS THE BUILD

Nine frames, and none of them is a stat line with a different colour. The Corvette deals a fourth card at every level-up. The Duelist carries its first gun twice — and pays for it with two fewer hardpoints. The Revenant fights better the closer it is to dead. The Prospector gets more out of the same wreckage and simply levels while everyone else is still counting. Each frame rewrites a rule of the run; the numbers are the least interesting thing about it.

GUNS THAT BECOME OTHER GUNS

Ten weapons across five families — autocannon, missile, laser, plasma and railgun. Every one has four tiers, and a tier is not "+10% damage": it is a new firing pattern. Volleys become spreads, spreads become orbits, orbits become spirals that never travel toward anything at all. Push the right pair together and a weapon evolves outright, into chain lightning that hunts through the pack or a burn that keeps killing after you have stopped looking.

THE SHIP YOU CAN SEE LEVELLING

Armour plates, a second engine, then a third, swept antennae, a dorsal rack, a halo in your frame's own colour. Your hull physically grows across a run, and every gun you mount is drawn on the hardpoint it actually fires from. At minute fifteen you can tell what someone built just by looking at their ship.

BOSSES THAT DO NOT STOP COMING

Ten of them, in rotation, and beating one only sets the timer for the next at a higher rank. They arrive with sweeping barrages, homing salvos, tracking beams, blast zones and summoned escorts — and with weapon arms you can shoot off, permanently, if you would rather fight the rest of it unarmed.

RUNS THAT PAY INTO THE NEXT ONE

Eleven unlock conditions turn a bad run into a better next one: frames, weapons and permanent extra hardpoints, tracked per profile. Five difficulties, from a Recruit pass to a Nightmare that is not being polite about it.