Strategy fans, get your blueprints and mech-building tools ready. Developer Starni Games—the team behind the acclaimed Strategic Mind series—alongside publisher Palaye, has officially revealed STEEL CORE, a thrilling new tactical turn-based strategy game that blends deep mech customisation, base defence, and escalating roguelite survival.

If you’ve ever wanted to pilot custom-built war machines while holding off terrifying waves of alien bugs on volatile alien planets, STEEL CORE is putting itself right at the top of your PC wishlist.

The Setup: Capitalism, Xenofortresses, and Bug Extermination

In STEEL CORE, you step into the boots of a mercenary squad leader contracted by Galactic Mining Industries. Your job? Protect valuable Xenoridium mining claims across hostile extraterrestrial worlds.

The catch: the local xenofauna wants you dead, and the corporate suits at GMI definitely didn’t fund the defence budget properly. You’ll have to balance tight budgets, limited power grids, and brutal combat scenarios to keep the drills running and get paid.

Key Gameplay Features

1. Deep Mech Customisation (Piece-by-Piece Construction)

Forget simple pre-set loadouts. In STEEL CORE, every mech is built from scratch—swapping chassis, arms, legs, shoulder mounts, internal cartridges, and micro-modules.

• Four Weapon Slots: Bolt up to four weapons onto a single machine. Want a dual-flamethrower build to burn alien swarms at close range? A long-range sniper with Gauss cannons? Or a jetpack-equipped flanker that drops behind enemy lines? You build it, you see it, you play it.
• Rarity & Stat Rolls: Parts come in different rarity grades with randomised stat rolls, meaning no two squads play identically.

2. The Daily Loop: Build by Day, Fight by Night

Missions run on an unforgiving schedule:

• Build by Day: Allocate limited budget and resources. Construct walls, gates, and watchtowers for your mechs to fire from. Set up automated turrets, research upgrades, and manage your power grid to keep the mining rigs running.
• Deploy at Dusk: Review enemy intelligence to see which direction the swarm is coming from and position your squad on a tactical grid.
• Fight Through the Night: Engage in deep, grid-based turn-based combat. Work line-of-sight, arc grenades over obstacles, deploy toxic smoke, and use terrain to bottle-neck the alien horde until dawn.

3. Escalating Roguelite Campaign

Your contract will take you across diverse biome environments—from frozen ice basins and toxic acid pools to active lava lakes and overgrown alien jungles.

• Resource Economics: Dead bugs yield Fibonite—a strange material that fuels the swarm’s evolution, which you can harvest to upgrade your own mechs and tech.
• Persistent Research: While research carries over between deployments, each new planet brings deadlier enemy variants, unpredictable environmental hazards, and massive apex predators.

Release Window & Platforms

STEEL CORE is scheduled to launch on PC in Q1 2027. Strategy fans can head over to Steam right now to check out the announcement trailer and add the game to their wishlist.

Find out more here

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