Scott Pilgrim EX has been out since March, and the one complaint that stuck was the roster. Tribute Games shipped a beautiful side-scrolling brawler with an original Bryan Lee O'Malley story and then asked players to fight through it without half the band. That is fixed as of today.
Back in the Band, the game's first paid DLC, is available now for $3.99 on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch — and it arrives alongside Coin-Op Chaos, a free update that adds a full Arcade Mode to every copy of the base game.
Three characters, three completely different jobs
The DLC adds Stephen Stills, Kim Pine and Knives Chau as playable fighters, and Tribute has resisted the temptation to make them palette-swapped variations on the existing cast.
Stephen Stills is the rushdown option — an aggressive, forward-pressing fighter whose attacks are built around his guitar. He is the character for players who want to close distance and stay there.
Kim Pine is the heavy. Drumstick strikes, hard-hitting mix-ups, and a moveset that rewards reading the enemy rather than mashing through them. Anyone who played Kim in the 2010 Ubisoft beat 'em up will recognise the temperament if not the mechanics.
Knives Chau is the speed pick, and the one Tribute has been showing off most. She is a hit-and-run fighter built around rapid knife strikes and acrobatic movement, with shadow-clone techniques and a scarf that functions as both a visual flourish and a range extender — it lengthens her reach and sells the acrobatics at the same time.
Three new assist characters come with the pack as well: Joseph the producer, Hollie from the video store, and Mr. Chau — Knives' father — who is exactly as reasonable a summon as that sounds.
The animation obsession
Tribute Games has always treated sprite work as the product rather than the presentation layer, and the studio has been unusually open about the thinking behind these three. 2D animator Artem Samoilov described the approach to the character select screen as building tiny self-contained performances: "Each selection animation was designed as a tiny performance."
That shows up in specifics. Stephen's idle carries a flicker of surprise under the relaxed posture. Kim stands with the flat, unbothered confidence that defines her in the books. It is the kind of detail that does nothing mechanically and everything for whether a character feels like the person you remember.
Coin-Op Chaos: the free half
The update everyone gets is arguably the bigger addition. Coin-Op Chaos introduces Arcade Mode, a score-chasing run through Toronto locations designed around the logic of a real cabinet: lives, credits, and a local ranking board rather than the story mode's checkpoint structure.
Crucially, it supports up to four players via both local co-op and online multiplayer, with drop-in/drop-out and cross-platform play. Scott Pilgrim EX's story mode is excellent solo, but the genre it belongs to was built for a crowd around one cabinet — and until today, chasing a high score with three friends across different consoles was not something the game did.
The streamlined progression is the point. Arcade Mode strips out the narrative pacing and leaves the combat system exposed, which is the correct decision for a game whose combat is good enough to sustain the scrutiny.
Where this leaves Scott Pilgrim EX
Released on 3 March 2026, Scott Pilgrim EX was Tribute Games following up TMNT: Shredder's Revenge with a new O'Malley-written story rather than a remake of the 2010 licensed game. It reviewed well and then did what most beat 'em ups do — settled into a quiet post-launch life.
A $3.99 character pack plus a free four-player arcade mode is a smart way to interrupt that. The DLC gives returning players a concrete reason to reinstall, and Coin-Op Chaos gives them something to do together once they have. Both are live now on every platform the game runs on.
Sources: PlayStation Blog, Gematsu, Steam
