Gulp.

Historical hack and slash title Wulverblade is going on sale to mark the release of version 1.1, which brings a raft of new features to the title, along with changes based on player feedback.

The patch arrives Thursday and will be accompanied by a 33 percent price reduction on the US eShop for one week. It will be on sale in Europe a week or so later.

Wulverblade v1.1 will include the following, as explained by Fully Illustrated's Michael Heald:

+ Easy Mode – This was the single most requested feature that we heard from both Nintendo Life readers and the web as a whole. It was a tough at first as we were getting other feedback saying that the game was too easy. So this patch now gives you an easier mode to play with which includes…
+ Boss Checkpoints – The other big request was boss checkpoints. For the folks struggling with the difficulty the check-pointing was making things even harder, so there is now a checkpoint before each boss in easy mode!
+ BEAST mode – This is the extra mode that is currently locked on the main menu. Once you’ve complete the game this unlocks and, well, let’s just say you’ll be wanting to play the game through again! For those that have completed the game on other systems and had access to this mode, they’ve loved it and we hope you do to. It's seriously good fun!
+ Performance boost – We’ve been able to reduce the loading times between levels! We’ve also boosted the frame rate in a many areas too.
+ Missing achievements – A few folks had mentioned that their achievements had disappeared. Worry not, they’re not gone, they just weren’t visible due to a small glitch which has now been quashed.
+ Bug fixes – We’ve addressed all the known bugs in the game and they should all now be gone.

The update was originally supposed to arrive late last year, but was delayed due to the discovery of a bug which the team behind the game couldn't replicate for quite some time. With no idea of how to fix the issue, the launch was pushed back.

Here's Heald to explain: 

This update was originally complete and submitted to Nintendo back in December with the plan of it going live whilst we were still in our exclusivity window with Nintendo. Sadly, we hit some HUGE roadblocks. Namely, one monster bug that only Nintendo could see. We’d bug tested the patch like crazy on all our available systems and it ran like a dream, but at Nintendo, they were seeing a crash bug that we simply couldn’t replicate on any device. You can imagine how hard it is to fix a bug that you simply cannot see nor reproduce. After many months of back and forth we finally got to the bottom of the issue. The bad news was that the sheer degree of changes we’d had to make to uncover this bug and then fix it in turn created some new issues. Many months and many changes later the patch has now been greenlit by Nintendo and is running like a dream.

We were gutted that we couldn’t get this out earlier, especially for the fact that the update flew through first time on all other systems without a hitch. You can imagine our dismay when this initial bug was still causing us issues months later on Switch. You can rest assured that the Switch version has had way more time lavished on it than any other version to date. 

 Heald also shared a little information with us about sales figures for the game: 

Switch sales were MUCH higher than the other systems. In fact, Switch sales are way beyond all the other systems combined! And last but not least, one stat that still blows us away is that we don’t foresee Steam’s year one sales even matching Switches DAY 1 sales! The Switch certainly has proven to be a fab system for us. We’ve not got a point of breaking even yet but sales have been good in general and it’s just a joy to hear people’s enjoyment of the game.

So there you have it; if you already own Wulverblade then all of this new content will make it worth another look, and if you've yet to make the purchase then the sale gives you the perfect excuse.