Features

Combat

Waves descend from the breeding membrane toward your Hive Core. Towers target, lead and fire on their own; you decide what grows where, when to relocate, and when to spend your hero's ability. Reactions (fracture + corrosion = shred), armor, shields, auras, artillery deadzones and flying strains keep placement decisions sharp for hundreds of hours. Some enemies are puzzles (plated, airborne, burrowing, shielded) and some towers are their answers: a barracks whose thralls body-block the lane, a long-range plague seeder, an armour-breaker for the whole board.

13 battlefields that change the fight

The arena is no longer one map. Each battlefield is its own geometry — twin lanes, an open maw, a maze-like coil, broken walls, flank funnels, a central breach — and it changes which towers earn their slot. The first campaign stages teach on fixed maps; deeper stages roll a battlefield that suits their biome and never repeat back to back; the Daily rolls one for everybody; Infinite shifts battlefield with every biome. Enemies respect the walls — nothing gets shoved through rock.

Four evolution layers per tower

Stars — permanent ★-paths bought with shards. Branches — in-run mutually exclusive mutations that re-author how a tower fires. Strains — in-run evolution fed by consuming duplicates from the Biomorph Conveyor. Mastery — kill-fed ranks with lore and visible cosmetic evolution. All four stack, and all four are visible on the battlefield model.

Gene cards — and 31 that change the rules

After every cleared wave you draft one of three Gene Cards, and each card joins your permanent Gene Archive for leveling. Most cards bend numbers; the Rule Genes bend rules — shred builds that reward pairing fracture with corrosion, infection that spreads on kill, conveyor economies, placement tricks, hero stances and deliberate risk-for-reward trades. Once you've earned one, every draft guarantees a rule-changing option, so each run can become a different build. Drafts deal for the board you actually built — the towers and heroes carrying your run show up more — and when Biomass piles up you can Splice it into an extra draft.

Heroes

Champions with battle doctrines (dive, guard, control, phase), active abilities, ★10 upgrade paths with ability forks at ★5/★8, and full Weapon/Armor/Relic loadouts with behavioral affixes and set bonuses — rendered on the battlefield by a procedural gear system. Benched heroes run timed Expeditions for materials while you play.

Doctrines — commit to a run

Before a run you may sign exactly ONE Doctrine: a Build doctrine that bends your own math, a Protocol that reshapes the enemy world (double swarms at half health; a handful of titans; a famine that pays premium rewards), or a Pact that does both. Doctrines carry campaign unlock gates, mastery ranks that raise their payouts, and a Bio-Dex codex of their own — commitment is a progression axis.

Hive Intelligence — automation that respects mastery

One button evaluates every Biomass purchase on the board — branch tiers, hero evolutions, conveyor deploys, strain merges — and executes the best ones while keeping a reserve. It works on content you have already beaten: Infinite and campaign replays. On your frontier, in the Daily and in Boss Rush record runs the decisions stay yours, and the button tells you why.

The Threat ladder

Beat something, then make it harder. Every mode you've cleared opens a ladder of 10 Threat rungs — each one names the single lever it turns (more health, faster swarms, bigger waves, harsher elites) and pays a little more. Climbing earns titles, profile frames and achievements; it never sells or grants Power.

The weekly game

The hive runs on rituals. A Daily Run — one deterministic seed worldwide. Champion Contracts — three constraint runs a week on one shared board, with a Gilded marquee exclusive and a Perfect Week sweep bonus. A weekly quest ring plus the permanent Descent Below questline, credited automatically from everything you already do. Weekly Directives — a cumulative objective ladder with milestone payouts. A Season Pass fed by all of it. Routine rewards claim themselves into your run results, so none of this becomes a chore list.

Set-piece hero casts

Every hero ability stages a procedural performance when it fires — the Cinderwyrm's breath is a dragon sweeping the lane, the Fovea's stare is a vast eye opening into a psionic lance, the Knell's peal is a bell descending to its slam — and the blow lands the moment the performance strikes. Support (heals, shields, rally buffs) stays instant, the zone payload travels with the animation, and the telegraph is real: what stands in the ring when it lands is what gets hit. All of it procedural, no sprites, no video — and it respects reduced-motion settings.

The permanent game

A genome upgrade tree, a levelable Gene Archive of draft cards, tower and hero labs, equipment crafting with pity protection and undo-able salvage, per-tower Mulligan organisms with class adaptations, collections with rank bonuses, Hive Construction, prestige with Ascendant nodes, and a Power Score that folds all of it into one honest number. Above the star caps sit Prime Strains — a deep per-unit ascension lane for maxed towers and heroes that folds into the same Power math.

A battlefield you can read

Every tower fires in its damage type — Kinetic darts, Caustic globs, Viral spores, Neural bolts, Vital orbs, Resonant pulses — in its own colour, so you can see who is hitting what. Splash shows its true radius, kills pop in the killer's colours, and crowded fights fade the small numbers so the big hits read. Bosses and Megas telegraph where and when their attacks land, hero abilities hit with a clear impact frame, every biome has its own ground and air, towers land and evolve with weight, and the Hive Core wears its health. Rarity looks the same on every card, item and container in the game.

A grind that tells the truth

Every goal on Home and Results shows how many runs away it really is, measured from your own recent income — "one more run" means one more run. When a stage outweighs you, Home's main button says Farm Infinite and shows how much each run closes the gap. Gear item level keeps climbing with depth, Mega raids pay Hunt ranks for every organ you burst even in a loss, achievement ladders keep paying at any depth, the daily Bio-Cache grows with your income, and nothing you earn quietly un-earns itself: Gear Codex entries are permanent and a Molt never demotes your Genome Rank.

A first hour that respects you

A two-wave tutorial teaches the real loop — wave, draft, build, wave — and pays one graduation reward. Your first two trips back to base are walked hands-on: open the menu, buy your first upgrade, crack your first container, see what to do next. After that, the hive opens a wing or two at a time over your first hours instead of all at once. Each run teaches at most two new systems in full, every new screen arrives with a short guided tour, fight controls like Early Call and game speed explain themselves in the moment you first need them, and the game never points you at a door that is still sealed. Lose a run and the results screen tells you how close you came and what got through.

The hive works while you're away

The Idle Harvest accrues while you're gone — materials, essence, shards, the occasional sealed container — with its own upgrade tree of harvest nodes. It is deliberately, provably the slower path: the design guardrail (enforced by automated economy simulations) keeps away-time income well under active play at every stage band, so the harvest welcomes you back without ever replacing the game.

Account mastery

An uncapped Account Level pays on nearly everything you do, with procedurally weighted level rewards, milestone titles and weekly/monthly XP leaderboards — and it keeps pace deep into the game, where your depth multiplies every run's XP. Above it sits the Genome Rank — a breadth-weighted rating folding every major system into one prestigious, infinite ladder, with a Progress Advisor that names your best next move. Promotions pay prestige, never power.

The hunt hunts back

Lose to a boss and it becomes your Nemesis — returning branded and buffed, escalating a grudge ladder (Marked → Apex Predator) every time it wins again. Revenge pays tier-scaled rewards, an exclusive phenotype and a permanent Vengeance organ for the trophy rack. Meanwhile The Front turns every finished run into territory: sectors climb tiers, regions entrench, and your conquest pays live passives.

Modes

Campaign — a procedurally authored stage ladder with events, milestone bosses and a Mega raid every tenth stage. Infinite — an AI Director escalating against your best. Boss Rush — wave N is N bosses sized to your Power, stamina-gated, paying per kill — and the next column won't wait. Daily Run — one deterministic seed per day, worldwide, verified by replay. Arena — live PvP siege races: two hives on one shared seed, first Core down loses, with ranked divisions, 30-day seasons and AI opponents whenever no human is in your bracket.

An economy players shape

The Auction House is player-driven: list gear and materials, bid on what others found, and watch the market authority keep prices honest. The Splice Market refreshes its stock on a clock, and the Ichor Exchange turns the premium currency back into the grind currencies at a deliberately worse rate for bulk.

Plays on your phone

Runs have dedicated portrait and landscape layouts: the board fills the screen, side panels become drawers, and every target is thumb-sized. Hub screens ask you to turn your phone sideways, but a finished run's Results stay upright. Back steps through menus and pauses a live run instead of quitting it. In a phone's browser the game sizes itself to what the address bar leaves visible; on Android and iPad your first tap goes full screen, and on iPhone you can add it to your Home Screen to play without the address bar. On desktop the board takes all the space the window allows.

Presentation

A living battlefield that terraforms with your run, procedural creature and turret bodies, set-piece hero-cast performances, a fully scored opening film cast with the game's own creatures and towers (the swarm climbs out of the crust, then breaks on a line of erupting towers and streams home as biomass) plus story cutscenes premiered by quest finales and Mega defeats (each Mega's premiere shows the monster itself, rising, igniting and falling), an adaptive generative soundtrack (the Mega raids have their own hymn; events re-voice the dailies) under a measured, mastered sound mix with separate effects and music volume, and gore that routes every kill's biomass visibly home. Boss kills land with a freeze-frame, a shockwave and a fall card; the last kill of every wave slows time for a heartbeat; a victory washes the hive across the whole board before your summary opens over it; and on desktop the biome continues past the board edge. Motion settings tune screen shake, damage numbers and flashes (they follow your device's reduced-motion setting). All of it procedural — the whole game ships lighter than one video file.

Fair by construction

Deterministic simulation, replays as links, replay-verified leaderboards and no energy timers on core play. Everything the store sells is earnable in play; Legendary and Exotic gear and campaign gates are never for sale; container drop rates are shown in the Vault; and where loot-box law requires it (Belgium and the Netherlands), nothing that can reach a randomized reward is sold for money at all. Saves live on YOUR device, with optional cloud accounts for backup and cross-device play.