With Dark Future now in everyone’s hands, we wanted to highlight some of the other stuff you can do in Blood Red States, other than terminate gangcult scum with extreme prejudice.

You might want to start looking at these after going through the tutorial and your first handful of missions, just so you have a feel for how the game plays.

While you should always keep an eye on your cash reserves to ensure you’ve got enough money for fuel, playing around with your vehicle’s weapons and items is a must to get the most from each of the characters.

Pop into the Shop after each mission to see what’s available, grab the bits you want, then head into the ZBC Simulation / Tutorial area to see how they work in combination.

Do this and you’ll find weird and wonderful combinations to push your play style in different directions. For example, you might want to try equipping a front-facing grenade weapon, turret-mounted laser, and pipe bombs, so you can launch tough enemies into the air while you boost, juggling them with your turret while passing by, then dropping a bed of explosives for them to land on.

Doing missions for the various Corporations rewards you with points that work towards your progress in unlocking special and powerful items in the game. And best of all, once they’re unlocked they enter the Shop’s pool of randomly generated items across any of your characters.

We won’t spoil what awaits you there, but you should definitely consider having a look for yourself, seeing what takes your fancy, and tailoring your approach to which missions you choose during each run accordingly.

Press the “V” key and you’ll enter the Free Camera Mode, which allows you to position your view into the world such that you can take dynamic-looking screenshots.

There’s a breakdown of controls in the game proper but essentially “WASD” controls horizontal movement, “Q” and E” controls vertical movement, and “Space” pauses the action completely.

You can take regular screenshots by using Steam’s built-in screenshot tool, but if you press “O” you’ll take a much more high resolution screenshot. To access these screens navigate to their folder on the drive Dark Future is installed, which is typically C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\DarkFuture\Saved\Screenshots\WindowsNoEditor (you may need to go to Windows Explorer, select the View tab, and then check the Hidden Items box to see these folders).

From the Garage you can customise the colours on your vehicle to get it looking just right, as well as adding a personalised licence plate.

We’ve already seen some fantastically creative uses of these functions, and we’d love to see yours too, either in the Screenshots section here, over on our Discord, or by tagging us into any posts on Twitter or Facebook.

We deliberately made the game to be friendly to newcomers to the Dark Future universe, but if you’ve been with the franchise for a while you’ll definitely spot the references we’ve hidden throughout the game.

And who knows, maybe there are a few nods to other Games Workshop properties in there too… WHO CAN SAY?

Once you’ve completed the Standard version of a character, you’ll unlock their Pro version, which provides a different tactical puzzle to try and tackle. These aren’t for the faint-hearted, but we hope you enjoy the challenge.

Completing a character’s Standard variant also unlocks a Perk for you to use on other runs. For example, once you unlock Second Chance, you’ll get an “extra life”, as it were, allowing you to cheat death once during a run. Dig through these to see which suits your play style best.