Many of these artists had worked on Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS games.

Originally, the project meant to follow a late 8-bit era aesthetic (late NES), but the game's artistic direction changed soon after the Kickstarter campaign due to the previous experience from the artists that joined the project. The project was first announced on Kickstarter in early 2015. In early 2046, Magnus Pierce's soldiers started collecting and refurbishing old nuclear, military, and robotic tech, and they started restoring the power grids of various abandoned cities which they now occupied. Taro grew up to be a core member of the Daybreak Resistance, an insurgency led by Hans Albrecht and Sonia Singh. His regime began a large-scale purge of all its real and suspected enemies, including protagonist Taro Takahashi's parents. Magnus Pierce, a famous inventor and roboticist turned army general, rose to rule over the ashes. The game takes place in an overgrown post-apocalyptic America, after all major American cities were abandoned due to mass radiation attacks in the late 2030s. The game has different difficulty modes, including an Arcade Mode in which there are no checkpoints and the player has only a single life. Taro mainly fights robotic enemies, and his electric whip destroys their energy cores, but he can also punch them up close to collect their cores and replenish his sub-weapon system's energy. In addition, the game features a basic sub-weapon system.

One other mechanic is a zip-line which allows the player to move vertically, horizontally and diagonally between elements or platforms. The game equips the player with an 8-way electric whip, along with a jump, double jump, and a short dodge slide. Steel Assault is a fast-paced 2D action platformer.

Steel assault initial release date