Not So Quiet Riot: Prison Architect Update Adds An Armoury

It's been a little while since I've seriously played Introversion's incarceration sim Prison Architect, but I've come to enjoy reading and watching their monthly updates just as much as playing it myself. Alpha 17 is now live and the video below details the various additions. The big one: you can now build an armoury in your prison and deck it out like one of those rooms that used to come before a boss fight in first-person shooters. The kind of room full of shotguns, ammo and bulletproof vests.

The kind of room prisoners might want to break into in case of a riot.

The armoury introduces a new set of tools with which to deal with riots: mainly, guns. If your prisoners are misbehaving, fighting one another or the guards, you can send a group in with weapons to intimidate them into surrendering. You can tell your people not to fire or to fire on sight, but guards will make on-the-spot decisions themselves if they feel their life is in danger and depending on the types of prisoners they're facing. This ends badly for lots of people - guards and prisoners - in the video above.

Of course, a few of your most violent prisoners, if they happen to be close by, will try to get inside the armoury themselves in the event of a riot. You'll need to make sure it's behind a lot of big doors to stop that from happening.

Other additions for alpha 17 include a forestry, in which trees will grow for you chop down and turn into money, and a new context-sensitive object menu designed to cope with the broadening scope (which is totally dope?) of the game. A full list of changes is over on the update's forum thread.

Now that there's more ways to deal with madness - and more importantly, many more ways for things to go wrong - perhaps we should send Brendan back in to try and build another nice prison.