I own this on Steam and for, early access it shows a promising future. This being the Studio's first game I expected there would be some bumps on the road at the start but it seems the dev team was able to avoid nearly all of them when the Early Acces first launched earlier this year. And for the bumps the players pointed out in the initial release the Devs listened and smoothed them out while making sure to improve where they could for this current update. Grid combat is still very casual but this new update that includes different types of exploding AOE barrels that cause different effects to enemies and allies alike; along with the introduction of directional backstabs and the new enemy Faction the, Kloi has given these sections of the game a much needed boost in strategy and planning of team composition. The SHMUPS (Shoot 'em up) sections of the game was , an still is in my opinion, the highlight of fun gameplay even from the initial build and this update raises the stakes even more and promotes a more aggressive approach to the bullet hell challenge that the enemies give you, especially in the higher ranked levels. Elaisha Sorn (aka Ela) is a very welcomed addition to the growing cast, not only for combat but story wise as well. Using her both in Grid Combat and in the SHMUP levels makes her feel like a natural fit for the world and lore Studio Fow is building. Pandora, without going too much into it, looks to be proceeding steadily, with even more features teased for future updates in Studio Fow's official blog. All in all if the Dev team can keep up this kind of quality and improve on it where they can then my hopes for the future updates up until completion is pretty high. I follow their dev diaries on their official blog for updates on development so I recommend going there if anybody is curious on what's to come next. https://blog.studiofow.com/
