Berzerk Studio — the team behind Just Shapes & Beats and Infernax — has announced Maximum Thunderness, a 1–3 player run-and-gun shoot-em-up with roguelite elements, launching on PC in Fall 2026. A debut demo dropped on Steam alongside the announcement and is available for a limited time right now.
The premise is, by any measure, exceptional. An organisation called S.K.U.L.L. (Syndicate for Komplete Universal Lawless Leadership) has overrun Earth with lime green alien criminals whose endgame is to infiltrate the hand-rolled cigarette street market and pirate Earth’s movies through residential WiFi connections. Only Maximum Thunderness — a special unit of uniquely powerful heroes — can stop them. If you’re detecting the energy of a Saturday morning cartoon from a timeline slightly off from ours, you are reading this correctly.
What Maximum Thunderness Actually Is
Beneath the cartoon villainy, Maximum Thunderness is a mechanically serious shoot-em-up with roguelite bones. Three uniquely powerful heroes to choose from, autoscrolling firefights across branching stage paths, item upgrades between stages, and combat designed to reward both genre newcomers and longtime shmup veterans. The roguelite element means runs stay fresh — items and upgrades shift your skillset enough between playthroughs that the game is genuinely replayable rather than just theoretically so.
Berzerk Studio has form here. Just Shapes & Beats is one of the most inventive takes on bullet-pattern gameplay in recent memory, and Infernax showed the studio could deliver on mechanical depth alongside strong stylistic identity. Maximum Thunderness looks like the marriage of both — accessible, high-energy, and with enough system depth to keep the most dedicated players engaged.
Key Features
Maximum Thunderness — Feature Breakdown
Platform & Release
Maximum Thunderness launches on PC in Fall 2026. The demo is live right now on Steam for a limited time — download it, grab a friend, and defend Earth’s cigarette market from the outer space crime wave.
Play the Demo on Steam