Every upgrade path now looks like what it does — and the backstory has been rewritten and restaged.
You can see what you picked. Previously, the eighteen upgrade paths only differed in numbers and effect — on screen, a Frost Cannon looked like an ordinary Pulse Gun. Now every projectile carries its path with it, and that determines color, shape, trail, glow and impact:
- Frost Cannon ice blue, Incendiary Core orange, Railgun Core white-hot, Cascade violet, Flak warm orange, Mirror Storm bright
- Sun Lance, Prism and Cutting Torch tint the beam itself
- Strangler, Hydra and Viper give the snake its own color, Interceptor Swarm, Rocket Reprise and Cluster Bomb do the same for the missiles
- The drone elements (Lightning, Fire, Frost) already had this — now it applies to everything
And it shows on the enemy, too. A burning enemy glows and throws sparks upward, denser with multiple stacks of burn; a slowed one gets an icy rim. The first time something ignites or freezes, a short ring flashes so the moment reads clearly.
Backstory. The prologue no longer runs as a zooming scroll but as a calm sequence of cards: soft fade-in, hold time based on word count, the last line stays on screen. A click jumps to the next card, Escape or the button ends it. The text is new — a more concrete opening (a star missing on a Tuesday; a scouting boat that comes back without its crew, carrying a clean pulse on every frequency), moving from there to the Cores, to the pulse as their only flaw, and to the ion chamber.