Clone Drone in the Hyperdome (2024) is pretty amazing on its own, offering up enough frangible voxel-baddies to swing a katana at across its Crashloop story mode. Coming July 27th, Clone Drone is getting a fresh injection of content with its new ‘Skyscrapper’ endless mode, letting you scrap through increasingly difficult challenges until your very last clone is slashed to bits.
I got a chance to go hands-on with the Skyscrapper mode on Quest 3, which mixes and matches the games enemies into new and unique patterns, serving up some of the most challenging battles outside of campaign’s end game.
But first, you’ll need to beat the game’s Crashloop story mode, which is a pretty tall order on its own. Once the Skyscrapper progress bar back at base fills up to 100 percent completion, you’ll be able to jump in to take on infinite floors of robot fighting.
And as you’d imagine, the higher you go, the harder it gets, serving up everything from multiples of everything, from basic baddies to the very toughest bots the game can throw at you—all presented in a variety of interesting arenas that remix every time you take on the Skyscrapper.
And it’s not just some random pick-and-mix either. Each floor has a theme, like swapped weapons, all Halberd Bots, or multiple Looprunners and bosses, like 10 Captains looking to end your run, or three Katas ninja-teleporting on all sides.
Full disclosure: I’m not really a fan of horde modes in general, although the new Skyscrapper mode feels a lot more like a roguelike, which I (rogue)like a lot. But it’s risky business, much more than Crashloop ever was. Powerups aren’t doled out as readily in Skyscrapper, although you can nab a few here and there as you move up level blocks, letting you replace clones or upgrade Turbofists.
That said, I got up pretty far during my hour and half of gameplay, although developers Doborog kindly gave me the ability to select from all levels—which won’t be possible when the mode launches. As it is, the infinite mode tops out at level 100, which I imagine will continue on repeat until you’re ganked for good.
The Skyscrapper mode also comes with a few updates and bug fixes to the main game, which you can find below:
Weapons & Enemies
- Cutting Resistance / Enemy Toughness
- We’ve added a new setting so you can adapt the difficulty of your battles.
- Brains! New green brains have been added to enemy heads. Attacking the head requires the CPU of enemies to be destroyed before they’re defeated.
- Two handed weapon handling options
- You can now pick how two handed weapons work:
- Angle and movement following the top hand
- Angle and movement based on position of both hands
- You can now pick how two handed weapons work:
- New Fire Katana and Fire Halberd weapons!
- 1 new level (Hard difficulty). Lots of bug fixes & minor updates & rebalances to existing Crashloop levels
- Faster level loading times.
- Improved Arm Extension Turbofist effects.
- Extinguishing fires by waving your hands is now much more effective and responsive.
- Improved sword glow effect.
- Increased the difficulty of the Gauntlet.
Enemy AI Behavior Improvements
- Enemies have new moves!
- The Captain, MX2 and Mark 3 Samurai Bots can riposte. After clashing swords with you, they might try to strike at you while your guard is down.
- Enemies will move to block if you aim ranged weapons at them!
- Improved enemy jumping animation and behavior.
- FLAMEWAR has some new moves!
- Overclock activates her Turbofist faster.
- Increase the weapon proficiency of some Mark 3 enemies.
Patch Notes and Bug Fixes
- Player hand movement is smoother and has a higher frame rate.
- After unlocking all the looprunners, there’s 1 fewer easy crawl before the first duel.
- Rebalances to the amount of coins the player gets and shop prices.
- Improved color grading to reduce color banding.
- Fixed misoriented colliders on a number of weapons.
- Fixed zombies failing to craft in complex environments
- Fixed several spots where enemies could get stuck across a number of levels.
In the end, there’s still a ton more of Skyscrapper to play through, although it feels like it could be a standalone title in its own right, which is probably the highest praise anyone can give for a post-launch mode. You’ll be able to pop in starting July 27th across all supported platforms.
You can find Clone Drone in the Hyperdome over on the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and above, and on Steam for PC VR headsets, priced at $20.
