Reviewed on PC and PlayStation Vita
→ March 21, 2014According to historians, the average life expectancy of a new pilot in World War 1 was around six weeks. Luftrausers, a 2D shooter set in that era, deals more in seconds, serving up deadly sorties in a sepia-toned theatre of war that may start with calm seas and open skies, but quickly escalate into bullet-hell levels of enemy planes, battleships, and aces to be taken out in the name of high scores and the pursuit of perfection. And unlocking new toys to play with, of course. If you're old enough to remember a game called Sopwith, it's not a million miles from that. If not, it obviously doesn't matter. It takes a minute to grasp the excellent action, and also die at least four times.
Luftrausers is hardly a complex game, but nor does it waste time earning its promotion from simple to refined. Everything feels right to the point that often it doesn't even feel noticeable, from the need to keep applying pressure to stay in the air turning even basic flight into an active thing, to the sense of weight in the heavier planes, to the health gauge (a circle around the plane) being constantly helpful but never distracting. It's the feeling of needing one more go distilled, in at least the short-term, into the way you press or push upwards to launch into the skies; where victory comes not from playing things safe, but diving into the fray and riding the catastrophe curve into the inevitable fireball at the end.*It's about avoiding battleship fire by ploughing into the sea, taking the heavy damage that it causes, then bursting out guns blazing on the other side a few picoseconds from death. Or attracting a big cloud of pursuers so that you can swing around 180 degrees and turn them into combo as well as cannon fodder. Rarely has a game so skillfully balanced the satisfaction of split-second evasion and high scores with the carefree casualness of knowing doom is inevitable and therefore matters not a bit.
Most importantly though, it's a game of regular achievement, with missions offering specific tasks that both force experimentation and provide a sense of progress. How, for instance, do you take out 80 enemies after your death? Try flying a nuke into battle, set to explode when your plane does. Take out enemies without firing? A great way to discover that if you pull them to the cloud layer at the very top of the screen they take just as much damage as you do, or more, if you're using the hull that allows for safer high-flying and underwater dives. These missions not only offer bite-sized reasons to play, but slowly teach the mechanics of survival without feeling the need to slow things down for ponderous tutorials. You learn by doing and you learn by dying, and in both cases, launch back into the skies to try again.
Two big features really make Luftrausers work. The first is that there are no health pick-ups to worry about, or any similar mechanics. You take damage, yes, and can't take much of it. Stop firing though, and your plane completely repairs itself in a matter of seconds. They're seconds during which you're likely going to be under intense fire and with enemies streaming in from every side, yes, but still seconds that can be bought with a burst of speed and careful dodging. It's a terrific mix of brutality and forgiveness that fully rewards getting stuck in at all times, even if it's just in the name of missions like running a series of suicidal assaults to kill enemies with the nuke, or attempting to survive long enough to take down some enemy ace pilots.
The second is that your plane is fully upgradable, with new pieces unlocking that allow for complete customisation for both specific missions and your own preference. Need more armor? There's a hull for that. Prefer speed? That too. Weapons include the basic machine gun, a laser that carves up the whole screen, and missiles, which sound good in theory but mostly exist to make you wonder who in their right mind would actually choose them.
The only downside is that a few of the components fall into that category, with all pre-Spread Gun weapons instantly becoming pretty useless as soon as it's unlocked, and the gimmickier bonuses on the armours often paling in the face of general survival. Avoiding impact damage for instance sounds good, but anything you might crash into does so little that you might as well just take the hit and then take a couple of moments to heal up.
Even so, each component comes with its own missions and thus reasons to use them, with the clever bonus that while you may need, say, the useless Homing Missiles for the 'Kill 2 Battleships in one game' achievement, you still get to choose both hull and engine - like the hull that also drops bombs, or the engine designed to glide happily through water.
The only real catch is that as the difficulty ramps up, the challenge can drift from brutal-but-fair to simply brutal, with Luftrausers having an annoying tendency to spawn too many enemies like battleships - huge, heavily armoured behemoths - that fill the skies with as many bullets as my room was quickly filled with cursing. Even then though, the raw action remains compelling through the randomly generated frustration, with enough challenges to appeal to both completionists and those who need more than the pursuit of a simple high score.
More...
→ March 21, 2014According to historians, the average life expectancy of a new pilot in World War 1 was around six weeks. Luftrausers, a 2D shooter set in that era, deals more in seconds, serving up deadly sorties in a sepia-toned theatre of war that may start with calm seas and open skies, but quickly escalate into bullet-hell levels of enemy planes, battleships, and aces to be taken out in the name of high scores and the pursuit of perfection. And unlocking new toys to play with, of course. If you're old enough to remember a game called Sopwith, it's not a million miles from that. If not, it obviously doesn't matter. It takes a minute to grasp the excellent action, and also die at least four times.
Luftrausers is hardly a complex game, but nor does it waste time earning its promotion from simple to refined. Everything feels right to the point that often it doesn't even feel noticeable, from the need to keep applying pressure to stay in the air turning even basic flight into an active thing, to the sense of weight in the heavier planes, to the health gauge (a circle around the plane) being constantly helpful but never distracting. It's the feeling of needing one more go distilled, in at least the short-term, into the way you press or push upwards to launch into the skies; where victory comes not from playing things safe, but diving into the fray and riding the catastrophe curve into the inevitable fireball at the end.*It's about avoiding battleship fire by ploughing into the sea, taking the heavy damage that it causes, then bursting out guns blazing on the other side a few picoseconds from death. Or attracting a big cloud of pursuers so that you can swing around 180 degrees and turn them into combo as well as cannon fodder. Rarely has a game so skillfully balanced the satisfaction of split-second evasion and high scores with the carefree casualness of knowing doom is inevitable and therefore matters not a bit.
Most importantly though, it's a game of regular achievement, with missions offering specific tasks that both force experimentation and provide a sense of progress. How, for instance, do you take out 80 enemies after your death? Try flying a nuke into battle, set to explode when your plane does. Take out enemies without firing? A great way to discover that if you pull them to the cloud layer at the very top of the screen they take just as much damage as you do, or more, if you're using the hull that allows for safer high-flying and underwater dives. These missions not only offer bite-sized reasons to play, but slowly teach the mechanics of survival without feeling the need to slow things down for ponderous tutorials. You learn by doing and you learn by dying, and in both cases, launch back into the skies to try again.
Two big features really make Luftrausers work. The first is that there are no health pick-ups to worry about, or any similar mechanics. You take damage, yes, and can't take much of it. Stop firing though, and your plane completely repairs itself in a matter of seconds. They're seconds during which you're likely going to be under intense fire and with enemies streaming in from every side, yes, but still seconds that can be bought with a burst of speed and careful dodging. It's a terrific mix of brutality and forgiveness that fully rewards getting stuck in at all times, even if it's just in the name of missions like running a series of suicidal assaults to kill enemies with the nuke, or attempting to survive long enough to take down some enemy ace pilots.
The second is that your plane is fully upgradable, with new pieces unlocking that allow for complete customisation for both specific missions and your own preference. Need more armor? There's a hull for that. Prefer speed? That too. Weapons include the basic machine gun, a laser that carves up the whole screen, and missiles, which sound good in theory but mostly exist to make you wonder who in their right mind would actually choose them.
The only downside is that a few of the components fall into that category, with all pre-Spread Gun weapons instantly becoming pretty useless as soon as it's unlocked, and the gimmickier bonuses on the armours often paling in the face of general survival. Avoiding impact damage for instance sounds good, but anything you might crash into does so little that you might as well just take the hit and then take a couple of moments to heal up.
Even so, each component comes with its own missions and thus reasons to use them, with the clever bonus that while you may need, say, the useless Homing Missiles for the 'Kill 2 Battleships in one game' achievement, you still get to choose both hull and engine - like the hull that also drops bombs, or the engine designed to glide happily through water.
The only real catch is that as the difficulty ramps up, the challenge can drift from brutal-but-fair to simply brutal, with Luftrausers having an annoying tendency to spawn too many enemies like battleships - huge, heavily armoured behemoths - that fill the skies with as many bullets as my room was quickly filled with cursing. Even then though, the raw action remains compelling through the randomly generated frustration, with enough challenges to appeal to both completionists and those who need more than the pursuit of a simple high score.
More...
