By Joseph Luster

Developer and publisher Dumbbell Games released the aerial combat game Metal Thunder in Early Access on Steam back in November 2024. The game promises a blend of the bird’s-eye thrills of Call of Duty’s AC-130 missions with roguelike progression—including the ability to regularly unlock more powerful weapons, upgrades and perks—and its roadmap shows what could be a bright future for the indie effort.

Much of the roadmap contains benchmarks for post-1.0, which includes features that will launch after the full version of the game is available. Chief among them is Campaign Mode, which aims to start a week after launch with a cadence of one new campaign mission every month. With these come new campaign-based modes, including time trials, stealth ops and more. The goal is to match the debut of each new mode with the latest mission’s theme, so the order in which these are added remains to be seen.

At the time of this writing, seven new weapons have been added post-Early Access launch. The devs also added four new maps in that time, as well as updates like ground troop control that tosses minor real-time strategy elements into the mix. Like any modern military outing with high ambitions, the folks at Dumbbell also have a zombie-themed campaign mode in mind. That one’s on the backburner—complete with a new progression tree, more weapons and themed survival maps—for sometime after the 1.0 launch.

The beauty of Early Access is the ability to chime in with your own feedback, which could help shape the future of the full game. It’s also slightly nebulous as far as 1.0 dates are concerned, so the full version could very well be here by the time this issue is in your hands! There’s some solid promise waiting in the wings here, especially if Dumbbell sticks to the roadmap.

Genre: Aerial combat
Platform: PC
Publisher: Dumbbell Games Available: Now

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