All Walls Must Fall adds daily challenges & time-warping adversaries
The bear necessities
It's been a busy two months for German nightclub tactical time-travel/cyber-thriller All Walls Must Fall. Since we last reported on the promising Early Access tactics game, it has received two major updates, the first of which added daily challenge missions - a good fit, given the improvisational, quickfire nature of the game - but the most recent update brought a santa-sized sack of new features, equipment and enemies to contend with.
The festively titled Nice & Naughty update opens with a bang; everyone's favorite piece of cyberware, the power fist, has received additional upgrade levels. The more you power it up, the more horizontal segments of wall it'll obliterate with a single punch, eventually blasting a five tile wide hole into your target. All Walls Must Fall indeed.
Given that a favourite tactic of mine to recharge my stock of Time Energy in previous builds was to punch a hole in a wall, claim my payout for 'scouting' the room, then rewind time, retaining the reward and knowledge but keeping the wall itself intact, I might just do this even more often. Not every piece of cyberware is gratuitously violent, of course. For the spy in a hurry, there's now a brain-washing pheromone spray that you can use to immediately pacify guards.
Making a scene and messing around with the space-time continuum doesn't look like it'll go unnoticed for much longer, though. The campaign difficulty has been ramped up somewhat with the introduction of three new types of rival time-traveller. The Phantom turns incorporeal after taking damage, and the Spectre appears to teleport around freely, although he may just be manipulating your position in time.
Most exciting of the new foes is the Nemesis. While sadly not as multifaceted as Shadow War's orcs, this is more the Resident Evil sort. The Nemesis will home in on you and stop at nothing. No pausing, no taking cover, not even slowing down as he casually walks through walls to get to you. They're also immune to your time-manipulation powers, so you're probably just going to have to kill them ASAP if you want any peace at all.
The game has received plenty more tweaking and polishing since we last went hands-on with it as well. More dialogues have been added to the flirt-tacular social 'combat' systems, and they flow a little more naturally in English now, making positive results feel a bit less like guesswork. Hirsute, rotund protagonist Kai also has a few new animations, making his dance-floor rampages just that little more stylish.
All Walls Must Fall is half off in the Steam sale, putting it at a very reasonable £5.49/$7.50. Even in its current, unfinished state, I'd say there's more than enough meat on its bones to make it worth the asking price, so take that recommendation as you will.