Surgent Studios, the developer behind Tales of Kenzara: ZAU, has unveiled its next game today, and it’s…absolutely nothing like Tales of Kenzara: ZAU. It’s called FixForce, and it’s a chaotic cooperative “extraction platformer” about a team of robots fixing machines using random parts they find lying around.
FixForce puts up to six players together as a robot repair crew sent into an area to fix various broken structures littered around the area within an allotted amount of time. Each broken machine indicates what parts are needed to fix it, and those parts can be found scattered around the level.
However, many of those pieces will be stuck behind obstacles: bodies of water robots can’t swim through, up tall towers, guarded by evil enemy robots. To collect them, you’ll need to use your robot building abilities to pick up and place objects strategically so you and your friends can climb across them to reach whatever it is you need. And if you’re injured by an obstacle, your head will fall off, and your teammates will need to find your head and body and stack them back together to resurrect you back into the game. Teams earn points based on how many things they fix within the time limit.
I got a chance to play a round of FixForce ahead of the announcement alongside the developers, and yeah, the level of silly chaos implied in the announcement trailer pretty much encapsulates it. It’s easy to get distracted goofing around with all the objects in the level and building weird, random things, but FixForce also lends itself to silly emergent moments, like when one of the devs tried to toss platforms at me to save me from being stuck on an island, and instead slammed one into me and knocked me right into the water.
It was a surprisingly cheery and silly time for a studio that just made a game about grieving the death of a loved one. That fact is not lost on founder Abubakar Salim, though.
“As FixForce came together, we saw the pure chaos and hilarity it was unleashing and made the decision to move quickly and publish it ourselves,” he said in a statement. “Yes, FixForce is completely unlike anything we’ve ever done before, but look: we made one game about grief and another about abuse and thought, ‘can we have a little bit of silly, stupid fun for a second?’ I promise we’ll go back to dark and depressing after this.”
Notably, this isn’t the same game Salim announced in 2024, Project Uso, nor is it the horror game announced last year to be published by Pocketpair. Surgent clearly has a lot of irons in the fire here, but its eagerness to get something released quickly makes sense given the scale of its long-term ambitions and its financial struggles in 2024.
FixForce is dropping in early access on March 12 on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, and its full, final release will also be on Xbox, the studio says.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
