Chain Reaction v0.45.0 adds voice overlay and Dirty Money health warnings

In Brief:

• Chain Games shipped Chain Reaction Beta v0.45.0. The build’s GitHub release is dated Nov. 13, and @RealChainGames announced it on X.
• The patch adds a live voice activity overlay, announcer countdowns at match end and predicted-health warnings in the Dirty Money mode.
• It’s the third beta build in three weeks, following v0.43.0 on Nov. 1 and v0.44.0 on Nov. 7.

Chain Games pushed Chain Reaction Beta v0.45.0 live. The release notes on the project’s GitHub page list a voice chat overlay, match-end countdowns and a new health readout for Dirty Money. Fixes include server freezes at match start.

“CHAIN REACTION v0.45.0 IS LIVE!” the @RealChainGames account posted on X. The post listed a “NEW live voice chat overlay,” “Match-end announcer countdowns,” “Smarter Dirty Money mechanics,” “Smoother weapon animations,” “Combat performance improvements” and “Major multiplayer stability fixes!”

Who’s talking

The release notes call the headline feature the Who’s Talking Overlay. It shows which players are speaking, placed under the radar with animated voice rings.

Announcers now call out the clock as a match winds down. The callouts come at 60 seconds, at 10 seconds and during the final countdown, in every game mode.

Dirty Money changes

Most of the gameplay changes are in Dirty Money. The mode arrived in v0.43.0 alongside the Dystopia map.

A new feature called Hot Grab Health Prediction shows players how much health they’re predicted to have left. The interface flags a grab as RISKY or LETHAL.

Uplink banking now takes the same three seconds to channel every time. On Dystopia, health kits have been moved away from the Uplinks, and the radiation visuals now get stronger as a player takes more damage.

The Rift Blade also produces blood effects on normal hits now.

Fixes

The patch fixes reload animations on empty magazines and weapon transitions when aiming down sights. Players who rejoin a match now show up correctly on the scoreboard.

Chain Games also fixed servers freezing at match start and a bug in spectator switching when players used menus.

A weekly cadence

The build lands six days after v0.44.0, which GitHub dates to Nov. 7. That patch added Dirty Money: Containment, a team mode where squads collect fallout tokens into their own vaults. The losing team is the one whose vault reaches zero.

The same build added glowing canisters on players’ backs that scale with how many tokens they carry. Dirty Money could also be played against AI bots using grey dummy chips.

In v0.44.0, the token leader got a gold crown on the minimap after holding the lead for 10 seconds, and teammates stayed visible on the minimap in team modes. The update also cut the download size, fixed a shotgun rapid-fire reload exploit and stopped Photon Rifle charged shots from exploding more than once.

Both builds follow v0.43.0, released Nov. 1. That patch brought in Dirty Money and Dystopia.

The game

Chain Reaction is a free-to-play shooter for Windows, macOS and Linux. The beta comes from GitHub as two-part archives for each platform, and players have to extract part one to install it. The official site says an Epic Games Store release is “coming soon.”

The site lists Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Gun Progression as playlists, plus three arenas: Slums, Dunes and Moon. It describes the core loop as “Kill to Earn,” with players earning CHAIN tokens from eliminations and “Instant Cashouts” to their wallets. The game is still in beta, and the value of anything paid out in CHAIN depends on the token’s market price.

The site also says the game is “Free to download. No hidden fees. No pay-to-win.”