Shakedown: Hawaii is coming to Steam on Tuesday, October 20th, alongside a big new update, plus a 25% off launch discount!

The Steam version brings the entire game to your PC, along with controller, keyboard and mouse support, leaderboards, achievements, trading cards, badges, and community emoticons. It also supports displays from 21:9 and 16:9 to 4:3 (of course!).

You've got that right! The next update adds a whole new difficulty mode, new types of shakedowns, a quick menu for upgrades, and much more.

The new normal setting boasts new and more difficult enemy types across the story missions, sidequests, and shakedowns, plus fewer health drops. New bulletproof and even fireproof enemies appear as the game progresses, necessitating the use of more varied attacks. When they arrive, you'll need to up your dodge game! You'll have to jump stomp, melee, or pick up and throw appropriate objects located around the area. The fewer health drops also encourage a more strategic approach and steer you towards more exploration. You'll start to pay more attention to where pick ups, shops, and vending machines are so you can replenish.

The original experience remains available as the "Easy" difficulty setting. Naturally, it made more sense to label it this way, rather than calling the new setting "Hard". The original game was specifically designed to be on the easier end. The new normal mode is designed to offer more challenge, but not to the degree of being experts-only.

I'm incredibly happy with how the new difficulty setting's turned out, especially as someone who's played through the game more times than I can count. It breathes a whole new life into the experience and I definitely think it makes a second playthrough worthwhile.

The empire building metagame has been extensively rebalanced under the new difficulty setting. Properties are more widely affected by inflation, multipliers give a more balanced boost, and shakedowns give higher rewards to encourage a broader approach. The overall changes make acquiring the island feel much more rewarding, and give further room for varied strategies to calculate an optimal speedrun. The order in which you unlock and acquire properties, which types you collect first, which ones you apply multipliers to, and when you complete specific missions -- it will all drastically affect how quickly (and cheaply) you can dominate the city.

New shakedowns have been added to add to replace some of the repeated scenarios. Many of the original scenarios have also been updated with additional layers of gameplay, combat or challenge when played through the new difficulty mode.

As for the Arcade Challenges, those will remain a singular difficulty (unaffected by the difficulty setting). This ensures all leaderboard entries are on an even playing field.

The new update will arrive first on PC (on October 20th). Console versions will follow, but still need to go through additional testing and certification.

The Steam version will launch on Tuesday, October 20th at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm UK.

It's priced at $19.99 USD, but will launch with a 25% off discount ($14.99) for the first week.

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