Glorious retro FPS 'Selaco' is now Steam Deck Verified and plans many huge gameplay upgrades

As far as retro-styled shooters go, Selaco is probably one of the best I've ever played. With chunky visuals, fun combat and some really nice level design. Now, it's Steam Deck Verified and we have a better idea of what's to come next.

Valve has now given it the glorious green Steam Deck Verified tick of approval, with their Native Linux version as of July 31st. So you can now hopefully be sure that you can take it on the go, and carry on with it on your desktop whenever you want.

As for what's to come next? They have pretty exciting plans, although they're not going to give us any dates on when to expect them. Posted in a developer update on Steam here's some of what's coming in the next update:

• Backpack Reloading - This was a frequently requested feature. This is a system where, after not equipping a weapon for a while, the weapon will be automatically reloaded with a full magazine (provided there is enough ammo for it). This ensures that players will always swap to a loaded weapon in the middle of combat. This system is optional and can be disabled.
• Improved Immersion & Interactivity - The next update adds brand new visual and audio effects, improves rain to look more atmospheric, adds new interactables and more. If you like a world that feels believable and reactive, you will love some of these changes.
• Weapon Rebalancing - Another round of weapon balancing! This also includes making automatic weapons more consistent with their damage output. The current version on Steam has an oversight where there is a solid chance to roll low damage numbers consecutively, making some automatic weapons feel weaker than they are meant to be.
• Stagger improvements - Currently, enemies are less likely to stagger the higher your difficulty is. This ended up being a bad idea because it makes certain weapons lose their usefulness. The next update will address this and compensate with something more reasonable.
• Another round of performance improvements - A large amount of code is being optimized to reduce the amount of strain on your hardware, resulting in smoother frames and less hiccups.
• A slew of other Quality of Life Improvements - Vastly improved Grenade Throwing, new Map Icons, a DMR that respects your Hold/Toggle setting and more.

There's a lot more than that, although the below content is likely to be a fair bit later. They're only a small team, and the game has a lot in it already, so they do have plenty of time to get this right. Still, I can't help but be excited by plenty of their future plans that include:

• Story Content - This is the big one. Selaco will get a major voice-over pass to flesh out Dawn as a character, the world of Selaco and the general plot. We unfortunately ran out of time to do this at launch, which made certain parts of the game feel more empty than we'd like. This is planned to arrive around the end of the year.
• Randomizer Mode - Another big feature is the Randomizer Mode. This aims to add tons of replayability to the game. It randomizes enemy spawns, introduces a Rarity System where some weapons and enemies are more powerful than usual, repositions ammo pickups and offers tons of customization to tweak the game to your liking. This mode is planned to launch alongside the Story Content update.
• Improved enemy tacticsI - Better Patrol modes, a goal system, cover system and more are planned for our AI. These will take a while, though, and may not appear until Chapter 2. Please bear with us as we give them an additional boost in intelligence!
• Adjustable difficulty during the campaign - We are looking into a system that allows players to drop the difficulty at any time during a campaign playthrough. We wanted to add this earlier, but it was quite a complicated problem to tackle and will need a bit more time.
• Customizable Mutators - We are working on a system that allows players to customize individual mutators before starting a new campaign. For example, tweak Hard-Boiled Mode to disable the additional projectile speed for the enemy, or play Hardcore Mode but with standard Weapon Reload behavior. Mutators that have been customized will show an apostrophe symbol at the Chapter Completion Screen
• Improved Safe Rooms - We are working on additional features to make Safe Rooms more interesting and useful. This includes a free one-time use Health Cache where players can refill their health, and an Armor Station where players can purchase armor. However, the latter might not appear until Chapter 2.
• Chapter 2 is coming along nicely - Chapter 2 introduces a large amount of new systems which we will talk about in a blog post closer to its launch.

You can buy Selaco on Steam priced at $24.99 / €24.50 / £20.99.

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