Humanity is again relying on the Square Avengers to survive a vicious alien onslaught. Unfortunately for humanity, our Avengers are busy proving their credentials in the Galactic Hero's Tournament. Hone your skills and level-up your character in the local single-player tournament, or skip straight to the main event and challenge your friends in one of the hilarious and frantic online skirmish modes.

All maps support six players including bots as desired. Local multiplayer supports up to four human players and online battles allow up to six. What's more, multiple local players can join online matches together, enabling online couch vs couch gaming.

Square Heroes features a unique gameplay mechanic: choose your available weapons at the start of a round and unlock them by collecting loot. Rounds begin with Melee combat and progress through weapon categories of Light, Heavy, Explosive and Special. This mechanic ensures gameplay variety so each match is never the same. Strategically choose your load-out to defeat your foes!

Earn experience points during gameplay to level-up your character. Reaching a new level rewards you with an awesome new weapon or a stylish new hat. Enhance your character's statistics by choosing from the unlocked melee weapons and hats.

It's taken longer than expected as we decided not to rush the launch and instead add a few more features. Being a multiplayer focussed game, it's vitally important that Square Heroes can sustain a decent user base (ie you!). The features we're adding are based on this:

• New "Last Alive" and "Team Last Alive" game modes. In these modes the aim is to die less than the other players/team. The number of lives is optional and you win if you are the last one alive. The idea here is to change up the gameplay so you are more careful to avoid dying.
• New "Kingslayer" mode. This is a co-op mode that pits you and your buddies against the Alien King. It brings the brutally difficult final level in the Tournament to multiplayer land.
• Dedicated servers. We plan to run at least 3 servers around the world to ensure people can always just jump in. If it's a quiet time you can slay some bots whilst you wait for other people to appear.
• Global chat screen. We're hoping this will function as a good place to tee up a game with people, or just hang out and talk Square Heroes!

We're also still deciding how exactly to integrate Steam leaderboards. One idea is to have monthly seasons where the amount of XP you earn is essentially your score. I'd be interested to hear other ideas though.

Other Features

• Game modes include Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Gnome Hunt, Team Gnome Hunt and Survival.
• Over 30 unique and challenging Achievements each of which unlocks a hat to equip your character.
• Earn XP and level up your character to unlock over 30 weapons!
• Seven stylish 2.5D maps
• Epic original music

Square Heroes will be available for $9.99.