Chroma Squad Director's Cut Adds New Game Plus, Fixes Balance Issues

Chroma Squad just got a Director’s Cut update, adding new game plus, new game plus plus, faster Mecha battles, controller support and another difficulty setting. The patch also fixes some balance issues and long-standing bugs. It’s free to all owners of the game, but if you don’t like the changes, you can revert to the old version easily enough.

Aside from NG+, which is grand if you’re the kind of people to replay a single game until the end of time, the Mecha battle revamp sounds most interesting. It speeds things up and replaces the random numbers machine with mini games. Here’s the list of major changes:

• Interface/Combat:
  • Full Controller support;
  • Drastically improved performance on combat, removed lag spikes that would occur in large maps;
• Mecha Fights:
  • Random chance removed, replaced with reflex-based mini-game;
  • Hit Chance % now represented as the difficulty of the mini-game (as Hit Chance gets smaller, click area diminishes and cursor speed increases);
  • Old Defense mini-game replaced with a different one with new Shield art;
  • Buff/heal skills now have a unique mini-game involving holding down and releasing the button;
  • All animation times and intervals between actions reduced by 50%;
  • Defense mini-game is now played only once per turn, instead of 3 times;
  • Director’s Instructions have been implementend for Mecha Fights;
  • New surprise features on Mecha Fights depending on the story branch you take (wink,wink);
• New Difficulty: Heroic:
  • Enemies have slightly increased Health and Damage over previous Challenging difficulty;
  • Enemies no longer try to spread their attacks across multiple Actors;
  • Enemies focus their attacks on the weakest Actors;
• NewGame+
  • After completing Season 6, players can Load the save file to start over with the same party;
  • It is possible to play the whole game 3 times (Regular, New Game+ and New Game++);
  • All Studio Upgrades and access to Marketing agencies go back to Season 1 status;
  • Studio Upgrades have increased acquisition and maintenance costs;
  • Marketing agencies have increased hiring costs;
  • Players keep their Income and Fans, but Shop and Fan Power costs scale up;
  • Players keep all their Actors, Skills, Materials and Items (yes, even that bike you may or may not have!);
  • All enemies are randomized on the episodes (except the Bosses);
  • Director’s Instructions are randomized on the episodes;
  • Enemy health and damage gain a base increase per Season;
  • Items are only updated twice on the campaign (Season 1 and Season 4), have higher costs;
  • New Item Rarity Tiers: Legendary+ (white), Legendary++ (green) and Heroic (red);
  • 80 new items to buy and Craft;

If you’re interested in the balance changes, you should check out the original Steam post. There’s a whole lot of them.