XBLIG News, Reviews & Previews

PERTH, Western Australia - July 19 - Gnomic Studios are proud to announce the first major update of their critically acclaimed Xbox 360 game Square Off, available as of July 19th 2010 via Xbox Live for free.

Lead developer Aranda Morrison explained why Gnomic felt Square Off was in need of a major patch. “We decided to work on a free update because there were a number of niggling issues with the initial release we wanted to address," he said. "This turned out to be the perfect opportunity to throw in some bonus content.”

The update includes 2 new Deathmatch levels and a whole multitude of little tweaks to make Deathmatch play substantially more awesome than it was before. For single player and co-operative play, another level has been added, and the difficulty adjusted so the game is both noob friendly and a challenge to veterans.

Every level now has scoreboards for your friend list and your local players in addition to the existing global scoreboard, so now you can know whether you are the toughest square in your crew. Player profile statistics and per level statistics have been included, so no more arguing over who was the weakest link in your team. The sound effects have been improved and new music tracks have been added that we feel suit the game more than some of the original music.

Gnomic recently dropped the price for the game down to a measly $1(80 Ms Points), making it 66% cheaper than the original retail price. According to Lead Tester Joshua Stewart, this was done as an experiment to see the how the price cut affects conversion rates and sales figures. "We plan to make the results of this experiment public sometime soon," he said. "This way the Indie game development community can use this data to help guide their own pricing decisions.”

Additions to the game include a total of 3 new levels, updated AI, local and friend list scoreboards, player statistics, audio improvements and a whole raft of minor tweaks, all for the rather generous price of nothing.

Demo versions of Square Off can be found here for the US and here for the UK