No time to talk, operator. TO THE FRONT.
We hit an anomaly at NODE 52. Something came over the ridge: a phosphorescent swarm, and it is devouring everything in its path. Rock. Steel. The garrison. Go and see what the hell is going on down there.
A million. A billion. A trillion. It changes NOTHING about your orders. Every light out there is one body. Not an effect, not a texture. One body, and they have to be killed one at a time. So kill them all. THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY IS IN YOUR HANDS.
That is not the question, operator. Nobody stops that thing. Whether you are still standing when it has passed: THAT is the question.
There is no world map and no level select. There is Node 52. What you carved, what you lost, what got chewed through: it is all still under your feet the next time you go in.
NOW MOVE.
IN CASE THAT WAS NOT CLEAR ENOUGH FOR YOU.
Because you have been green your whole lives. And yes, it happens: the enemy is right there in front of you, and you forget you are not here to knit. Some of you fill your trousers. So I will sum it up. Slowly. With headings.
It is simple, though. IT IS ALL ABOUT KILL OR BE KILLED. Either you eradicate that F@#%ING SWARM, or it swallows us whole. For that, you have been handed the controls of NODE 52, the most advanced base on this planet. Grow it. Upgrade it. Turn it. Dig it in. Hold it. Everything below is how, and I will not say it twice.
WHAT KIND OF GAME. Single-player, real-time tower defense and base building, played in runs. You build between contacts and you hold during them. Lose the core, the run is over, and you get to explain that to me.
THE OBJECTIVE. Hold Node 52. Every contact you hold pays out credit. Credit grows the tree. The tree holds the next contact. That is the loop. There is no other objective, so do not go looking for one.
YOUR BASE. A tree of nodes, grown one node at a time. Every node is a weapon, a wall and a piece of your hull, all at once. Three weapon lines, WALL, CANNON and MINE, ten tiers each, and the top tiers change what the weapon DOES, not how hard it hits. Six enchantments on top: magnetic veil, anchoring, dike, electrification, faraday cage, overclock. Learn them.
THE ROLL. What a node opens is drawn from a table seeded by your run. Freeze a node to lock it. Reroll it to change what it opens. Grow less and your odds of a big draw go up. No two runs grow the same tree, so do not bother memorising one.
YOUR SHIELD. Not something you buy. It is the hull stretched around your nodes, and it redraws itself the instant you move a branch. Fold inward: a dense shell. Spread outward: long-range fire with a thin skin. Two postures, no mode button. Pick one before they arrive, not after.
THE ENEMY. Four bodies in the swarm: WALKER, SPRINTER, HULK, CRAWLER, each with its own speed, its own bite, its own hit points, mixed into every contact. Every light on your screen is one simulated body with its own position and its own velocity. Nothing is instanced away. Nothing is faked. I wish it were.
WHERE THEY COME FROM. Seven attack vectors: ground, roads, air, water, underground, network, waves. The vector of the next contact is announced before it hits. You will always know what is coming. Being ready for it is your problem, not mine.
THE GROUND. Raise ridges, cut channels, flood a corridor, in real time. That thing flows like a fluid and reads the terrain, so your shovel decides where the mass breaks and where your guns get a clean line. Use it.
ONE SITE, NINE SECTORS. Node 52 is one place with nine sectors: THE PERIMETER, THE SUBURBS, HANGAR 18, THE LAKE, THE SHAFT, THE BONEYARD, THE RIG, THE VERTICAL, THE RIVER. A sector is not a map somebody drew. It is a set of rules: the layout comes from your seed, and each sector decides which disasters can happen there. A sector with no water has no flood, and no way to put out a fire. Think about that before you pick one.
THE SITE DEGRADES. Between contacts the environment mutates: fire, landslide, fissure, flood, storm, dust, drought, quake, lava, fog, frost, magnetic cloud, and worse. Seventeen mutations, and they stack. A mutation never just changes a number. It takes ground, disables gear, blinds your radar or rewrites a rule.
DIFFICULTY IS MEMORY. Four modes: ROOKIE, OPERATOR, VETERAN, ZONE 52. No mode inflates damage. Each one sets how long the site remembers what fell on it. ROOKIE forgets a disaster when the next one arrives. ZONE 52 forgets nothing, ever. Neither do I.
TWO SCREENS. A full HD view, and a monochrome tactical view: one ink, circles and vectors, the kind of screen you get in a warship's combat room. Same simulation, same fight. Switch whenever you like, it will not save you.
THE SOUND. The soundtrack is generated live, not played from a file. Cold while you build, hot when the contact hits, and it follows the fight. If it gets loud, that is not a bug.
LANGUAGES. Interface in English, French, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese. The orders are the same in all five.
EARLY ACCESS. Everything above is in at launch. Early Access adds, in this order: mobile units across ground, water and air, countermeasures for what the swarm leaves in your branches, and asymmetric co-op, one commander in the sky and players on the ground. You will be briefed when it lands.
Inventory complete. Any questions? I did not think so.
DISMISSED. It is already a disgrace that you are still standing here reading me while we are being overrun by those damned... whatever the hell they are.
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