Neural Shock v1.1 - Total Destruction Patch Notes

Main Features

Since Neural Shock launched, we have been listening to all of your feedback and reviews carefully. The Total Destruction update is our answer to your suggestions, commentary and concerns that we have heard along the way. The core priority of the update is to provide players with more interesting gameplay content, improve the replayability of previously completed missions, increase the variety of viable builds in the endgame (making also the low-tier weapons endgame-viable), as well as to give the game the finished look, feel and sound that it deserves. The main features introduced in the Total Destruction update are: Chapter 2 that offers 15 even more challenging Missions than before, new Enemies, a new Challenge mechanic, Active Skills & Skill Tree Overhaul for the Player Characters, Weapon & Armor Equipment Rewards for the characters, new unlockable Mission Modifiers, as well as an overhaul of the game engine's lighting system, soundtrack, visual effects and textures. Full feature list, detailed changelog and balance changes are found below. The full list of balance changes is found in https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2862970/view/562489816939233299

Features

The following features have been added in the Total Destruction Update.

New Chapter with 15 Missions
- Night City, Facility and Dungeon Missions
New Monsters
- Psycho Prime
- Gargantuan
- Cyborg
- Boomer
Mini-Bosses (Elimination Targets)
- The Demented One
- Behemoth
- Cyber Tyrant
Challenge Mechanic
- Complete additional Challenges in Missions to earn Rewards
- Turret / Trap Rules, No Damage Challenges, Modifier Challenges, Time Challenges
Character Equipment Rewards
- Earn new Armors and Weapons for your Characters by completing Challenges
Character Skill Tree Overhaul
- The Skill choices in each characters' Skill Trees have been overhauled while respecting old play styles
- Added Choose-One type Passive Skill Choices
- Added Choose-One type Active Skill Choices. Active Skill is activated with a hotkey and has a skill-specific cooldown
- NOTE: Your Character Skill Choices will be resetted and the points will be refunded after the update
- More details are found below in the Balance Changes section
Increased Skill Caps of Turrets & Traps
- Tier 1-4 Traps/Turrets have a Skill Cap of 24, Tier 5 Traps 20 and Tier 6 Traps 18
- After allocating 12 points, the Skill Point cost is doubled, and after 18 points it is tripled
Turret & Trap Upgrade Level 4
- After allocating 24 Skill Points on a Turret or Trap, a new Level 4 Upgrade is unlocked
New Passive Turret & Trap Skills
New Resource Pick-Ups
New Mission Modifiers
New Experience Factors
Statistics View at the End of Mission
45 New Steam Achievements
14 New Songs added to the Soundtrack
Enemy waves in the last missions in Chapter 1 overhauled
Lighting and visuals in all Chapter 1 missions revamped

Improvements

The following gameplay improvements and performance optimizations have been added in the Total Destruction update.

Gameplay Improvements

The trap and turrets' stats are now shown also while in a mission when selecting a trap or a turret. When clicking on an upgrade, the changes are reflected in the stats view
- The stats view can be toggled on and off with a hotkey to reduce UI clutter on screen when required (Default: T)
Added visualization for the player character's weapon range. Range visualization can be toggled with a hotkey (Default: R). Range visualization is toggled off by default.
Added a Respawn button for confirming the Respawn after dying. This allows players to ensure they have selected a safe spawn point before the character respawns
Top stats for a completed mission are shown in the mission selection screen: Top Damage, Top Time, Top Kills
Explosive projectiles (rockets, plasma cannon etc) now explode when they reach their maximum weapon range if they had not impacted anything before
Improvements to wave spawning mechanics:
- Some missions now have "Special waves". These waves will always have a fixed number (unaffected by mission modifiers) of certain special enemies that will always spawn at an exact point of time in the wave
  - E.g. mini-bosses, rarely spawning enemies
- Adjusted the intervals of enemy spawning so that there should never be a huge clump of enemies spawning at the last second of the wave even with a high enemy count
Added New Turret and Trap Upgrade Effects
- +X% damage when target is under Bleed/Freeze/Burn/Cripple/Stun effect
- +X% damage per each Stack of targets' Bleed/Freeze/Burn/Cripple/Stun effect
- +X% Chance to cause Y status when under Bleed/Freeze/Burn/Cripple/Stun effect
- Convert projectile into a different type

Performance Optimizations

Initial loading time of the game is vastly reduced. Some of the gameplay assets are now being loaded in the background while in the menu, and the loading is finalized when first starting a mission
Added a Lighting Quality slider in Options. On low-end GPUs (e.g. integrated GPUs), adjust the slider to lower quality to improve performance
Major performance improvements and optimizations to
- Gameplay performance
- NPC pathfinding & processing logic
- NPC wave spawning logic
- Performance of blood splatters
- Processing of graphics / rendering pipeline
- Lighting processing

Visuals

Lighting update: Added new lighting types, improved existing lighting and their performance
Remodeled the lighting and sceneries in all of Chapter 1 Missions
Added Camera Shake effects. Camera Shakes are caused by explosions and strong weapon kickbacks
- Strength is dependent on the distance between the player character and the source of the shake
Texture improvements
- Updated the UI element visuals in the mission selection screen and skill trees
- New sceneries, new mission tilesets
- Added a "shine" effect on traps / turrets which indicates when the traps or turrets are upgraded to Level 4

QoL Improvements

Indicators / Visual effects

Added Player character weapon range indicator (See Section: Improvements)
Added a field in the turret/trap information that shows the attack style of the weapon: Line shooting, Auto-Aiming, AoE or floor trigger
Added texts in the main Loading Screen that indicate the progress of the game's loading
Added a Camera Pan Speed slider in the Options
Added Camera Panning by holding MMB and moving the mouse
Added a light that surrounds the player character which automatically adjusts its brightness according to the lighting of the surrounding area

Skill Trees

Logic for picking skills in the skill trees changed: Left-click to increase skills, right-click to decrease
Shift-click the skills in the Turret & Trap skill tree to quickly add or decrease skills by 5 points at a time
Added numbers to indicate how many skills have been allocated in each of the skill trees' branches
Skills that have been leveled in the skill trees should now visually be more clearly distinguished from skills that are not yet picked
Added color indicators to skill levels to indicate when the skill cost is increased in the Turret & Trap skill tree (Green = Normal Cost, Orange = x2 Cost, Red = x3 Cost)
Added a reset button for the character skill tree

Menus

Shift-click the mission page selection arrows to quickly move to the beginning or end of mission list
When opening the in-game menu while in a mission, the current total time spent in the mission (excluding when the game was paused) is shown at the top
Pressing ESC while in game now also opens the in-game menu instead of just pausing the game
Added sounds and visuals that play when hovering over the main menu buttons

Sounds & Music

Remastered all existing songs to improve the sound quality
Adjusted music sound levels to align better with sound effect levels
Added 14 new songs. New genres include: darksynth, acid techno, melodic metal and psychedelic rock
Added cross-fading of music tracks when the tracks change
Updated music playlists: Instead of randomly playing a song one after another, each mission now has their own playlists that feature different styles of music, better aligned with the mission's atmosphere
Removed overlapping for some attack / hit / death sounds to reduce super loud noises caused when playing exact same sounds simultaneously
Added a separate "Victory Music" that plays when the mission was successfully completed
Increased the hearing distance of the player character

Bug Fixes

Fixed bugs related to NPC pathfinding: The NPCs should get stuck much less frequently and they should not be warping due to having been stuck anymore. Note: If you still see warping enemies in v1.1, please report it in our Steam discussions page. A video showing the situation would be ideal
Fixed NPC attack range calculations
Fixed an issue where traps were not always immediately updating their animations after upgrading
Fixed an issue where the weapon stats or the turret/trap stats were not updated in the stats view properly after the character got new skills
Fixed an issue where multi-shot stats were not shown properly for all turrets & traps in the stats view
Fixed some issues where game was not logically paused / unpaused after completing some actions
Fixed some minor memory leaks
Fixed potential issues which could have caused the game to crash
Fixed an issue which could have caused some NPCs to be in a deadlocked state
Fixed an issue where the selected mission was still highlighted after closing the mission information screen, or returning to the menu from the mission
Fixed projectile speeds when x2 or x3 speedup is enabled - bullets were traveling faster than they should have at higher speedups
Fixed an issue where High Value Target II skill did not apply correctly if weapon did not have a base crit chance
Fixed an issue where the player could pick trap skills from a tier with a high skill requirement and then unpick the previous tiers' skills and still be left with the higher tier skills even after they were locked

Minor Changes

Adjusted the character and command center hit effect from white to red tint
Adjusted some tutorial texts and tooltip positions
Changed the default sound volume and music volume to 50 if not set previously by user. (Previous default was 100 for both)
Changed the default shoot mode to Click-to-Shoot
Changed the default Blood Splatter amount to 1 (previously 3)

Balance Changes

Changes related to gameplay mechanics, player characters, skill trees, enemies and traps & turrets. Full list is found in https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2862970/view/562489816939233299

Gameplay Mechanics

The cost penalty for building traps/turrets of the same type is now steeper than before. Additionally, the cost penalty maxes out at 6x cost - previously the cost was 3x at a maximum.
Mission Modifier changes
- Murderous
  - Damage Modifier changed from +80% to +60%
  - Enemy Move Speed Modifier changed from +60% to +10%
- Insane
  - Enemy Move Speed Modifier changed from +70% to +20%
- Frenzied
  - Enemy Move Speed Modifier changed from +80% to +20%
- Added 2 new Mission Modifiers (unlocked by completing Chapters)
  - Deranged
  - Hurried

Character Base Stat Changes

Sniper
- Increased the Base Damage of the default Sniper Rifle from 10-16 to 16-24
- Increased the Move Speed from 25 pu/s (pixel units / second) to 29.4 pu/s
Engineer
- Increased the Base Damage of the default Engineer Pistol from 2-5 to 4-10
- Increased the Move Speed from 27.8 pu/s (pixel units / second) to 31.3 pu/s

Character Skill Tree Changes

The Character Skill Trees were substantially revised in order to make the different branches more meaningful and to add more interesting Skill choice aspects into the design, so that even at a higher level there can be different builds which change the gameplay style of the character class. While some skills have been removed in order to accommodate for the changes, many of the skills have merely been relocated to different tiers, or had some alterations to their stats. These changes were required to balance the skill trees with respect to the newly added Passive and Active skills explained below, but the goal with the revision was to allow players to build their characters in a similar style as before.

There are now Choose-One type Passive Skill Choices on Tiers 2 and Tier 7. Only one passive skill can be chosen per Tier. Unlocking the Passive Skill choice requires you to pick skills from the corresponding branch before that Skill. After choosing one of the branches' Passive Skill, you may continue on any of the branches below it.
Additionally, there are Choose-One type Active Skill choices on Tier 5. The Active Skill is activated with a hotkey, and has a skill-specific cooldown. (Default: G)
- Note that the Active Skill is different from the Special Ability of each character, and they are not mutually exclusive. The Special Ability works similarly as before.
- After choosing one of the branches' Active Skill, you may continue on any of the branches below it.

Note: below, the notation "Removed skill: Add Damage (3, relocated)" means that an Add Damage skill with a skill cap of 3 has been removed from that Tier, and placed in another Tier or Branch in the Skill Tree. Note #2: The changes to the Character Skill Trees require that your skill choices will be resetted after the update. If you wish to write down your build, you should do it before applying the update.

[ 2025-03-07 17:52:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Neural Shock

Hardwired Studios Developer

Hardwired Studios Publisher

Q2 2024 Release

Action Indie Strategy Casual RPG Adventure Simulation F2P Sports MMO Racing Singleplayer Multiplayer Coop EA Tags

Game News Posts: 28

🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
🎮 Full Controller Support

Positive (34 reviews)

Steam Store

Build, Fight, Improve, Obliterate. Create bloody mayhem by building turrets and traps in strategic positions and fighting waves after waves of ferocious clones and creations of immoral research. As you gain experience in the battlefield, improve and develop your characters and weapons to get more and more powerful and decimate your enemies.

Combining the classic Tower Defense gameplay, graphic pixel-art violence and elements of character and team building action RPGs set within a dark, futuristic sci-fi world, Neural Shock brings an engaging experience which caters both to short and long play sessions to experience at your own pace.

Engaging Tower Defense Puzzles
Unique tower defense missions in an engaging, dark and futuristic world, complemented with captivating side objectives that require razor-sharp senses and wits to complete in the most optimal ways.

Visceral Pixel-Art Violence
Tens of different ways for each monster to meet their maker, ranging from getting shredded, electrocuted, burnt to a crisp, melted to a pile of goo, and many others, visualized and animated with crunchy pixel art graphics that don't hide any ounce of blood or drop of gore. Let your creativity run wild as you discover new ways to eradicate the murderous cretins that run amok in this vicious world.

Class-based Character and Team Building
Pick your favorite class, delve into the monster-filled world and exterminate the horrid creatures to level up and create your optimal build by specializing in different weapon, turret and trap masteries and selecting the best supporting abilities for your playstyle. As you progress further, you'll gain access to new team members to aid you in the fight in the battlefield, whom you can also level up and improve as you best see fit.

MINIMAL SETUPOS: Ubuntu 20.04
Processor: Dual Core CPU. Intel i5 or betterMemory: 4 GB RAM
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: 512MB VRAM. OpenGL 3.0 support
Storage: 1 GB available space
RECOMMENDED SETUPOS: Ubuntu 22.04
Processor: Dual Core CPU. Intel i5 or betterMemory: 8 GB RAM
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: 1024MB VRAM. OpenGL 3.0 support
Storage: 2 GB available space

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