About This Demo

YOU'RE STILL READING?

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.

HOW MANY? WHO CARES.

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.

YOUR ORDERS

GROW.The base at Node 52 is a tree. There is no build menu. You grow the thing itself, node by node, and every node is a gun, a wall and a piece of your hull at once. Grow it greedily and it comes down under its own weight.

TURN. Every node is a joint. Turn one and its whole branch swings with it. Turn the root and the entire base pivots. That is how you aim your guns, and it is how you aim your growth.

DIG. Raise ridges. Cut channels. Flood a corridor. That swarm is a fluid and it obeys the shape of the ground, so the ground is the main weapon you have.

YOU WILL BE OVERRUN

That is not the question, operator. Nobody stops that thing. Whether you are still standing when it has passed: THAT is the question.

ONE SITE. IT NEVER RESETS.

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.

NodeFeat

ONE NODE. HOLD IT. NO DEFEAT.

NOW MOVE.


IN CASE THAT WAS NOT CLEAR ENOUGH FOR YOU: THIS IS THE DEMO.

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.

Same game, same orders, one sector. Nothing in this crate is cut short: what is in is in whole, what is out is absent.

• WHAT KIND OF GAME. Single-player, real-time tower defense and base building, played in runs. Build between contacts, hold during them. Lose the core, the run is over, and you get to explain that to me.

• WHAT IS IN. One sector of Node 52, THE PERIMETER, laid out from a fresh seed every run, so no two runs look alike. The whole loop: GROW the tree one node at a time, every node a weapon and a piece of your hull. TURN a node and its whole branch swings to aim. DIG ridges and channels while that thing flows around them like a fluid. HOLD the contact. Three weapon lines, WALL, CANNON and MINE, on their first tiers. The four bodies of the swarm: WALKER, SPRINTER, HULK, CRAWLER, every light on screen one simulated body. Two difficulty modes: ROOKIE and OPERATOR. Both screens, full HD and monochrome tactical. The live-generated soundtrack. Interface in English, French, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

• WHAT IS OUT. The other eight sectors. VETERAN and ZONE 52. The upper tiers and the six enchantments. The seventeen environment mutations that stack between contacts. Everything Early Access adds afterwards. And nothing from the demo carries over: in the full game you start clean, like everybody else.

• HOW LONG. One sitting is one siege. Then a new seed, and another. Run it as many times as you can stomach.

• WHAT IT COSTS. Nothing. No account, no sign-up, nothing to buy. That is not generosity. That is recruitment.

You have seen the crate. 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.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

AI was used for trailer and capsules, not in game