Surgent Studios has built a reputation for games that carry emotional weight. Tales of Kenzera: Zau explored grief through a metroidvania lens; Dead Take delivered surreal horror in first-person perspective. Now the studio is deliberately stepping away from that formula entirely.
The studio's next project is FixForce, a cooperative game designed for up to six players. Rather than crafting another narrative-heavy experience, Surgent is leaning into pure chaos and humour. Players take control of robots tasked with repairing a post-post-apocalyptic world, working together (or sometimes against each other) to complete jobs under time pressure.
The core mechanic revolves around a telekinetic tool that lets you pick up, rotate, and throw machine parts and junk scattered throughout each level. You'll use these pieces to solve environmental puzzles: constructing bridges, ramps, and towers to reach new areas or complete repair assignments. The game's challenge comes from constant time limits and hazards that drain your robot's battery. You can't survive water. Enemy bots occasionally latch onto your chassis and siphon power. Most importantly, your teammates can help or hinder you with equal ease. A simple click can push an ally off a ledge or steal their battery to power something you need.
When you die, your robot's head pops off but you retain control of it. If a teammate recovers your body and reattaches it, you rejoin the action with a drained battery. Otherwise, you can choose to explode and respawn with one of your limited lives, your power restored.
The game leaves many questions deliberately unanswered. Who assigns these repair jobs? Where have all the humans gone? What apocalypse created this world? According to studio founder Abubakar Salim, this vagueness is intentional. In a press release, Salim said the team decided to "move quickly and publish it ourselves" after seeing the "pure chaos and hilarity" the game produced during development. He framed FixForce as a deliberate palate cleanser: "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."
GameSpot's preview of the game offers a mixed assessment. The experience felt "a bit unpolished", which makes sense given the game launches in early access and will evolve post-release. However, concerns emerged about whether the core loop has enough variety to sustain interest. The formula currently revolves around finding a broken machine, locating the required part, delivering it, building a path to the next machine, and repeating. While this structure could theoretically work, the early access build offered limited evidence that the developers will expand or complicate the formula in compelling ways.
FixForce launches in early access on both Steam and the Epic Games Store on March 12. The full release is scheduled for later in 2026, alongside a console version for Xbox.