You'd be forgiven for writing Luftrausers off as some sort of flash game that has escaped the bonds of its URL and is now trying to pass off as a full fledged arcade game, price point and all. With its heavily pixelated art style, two-tone colour palette and distorted sound effects it really does do a fair bit of nostalgia mining, but manages to deliver one of the better arcade orientated experiences of recent memory.
Though Luftrausers may come off as a pretty straightforward shooter, it soon reveals itself to much more offering up a combat system and plane customization with a fair amount of depth to it. Instead of directly controlling your Rauser's flightpath you instead rotate it in the chosen direction and hit the throttle to move in the direction you're pointing. A;l the while you'll be subject to some fairly harsh physics that mandate a constant awareness of your trajectory, otherwise turbulence and gravity will send you crashing down to earth before the enemy can even fire a shot.
The result is something that does an excellent job of making the player feel the sensation of movement as he/she hurtles their Rauser through the air, twisting and turning all the while to avoid enemy gunfire and open up an opportunity to deliver their own shots. While the triggering the engine is central to getting around the real trick to Luftrausers is mastering the plane's stalling technique which, while slowing you down adds some vital mobility and a chance to take down some of the enemy aircraft that litter the the screen.
Luftrausers takes this great foundation and builds one of the most satisfying score attack games around it that I've had the pleasure to play. Each enemy you kill adds a number to your score multiplier taking it up to a maximum of 20, but you'll have to keep up the destruction if you want to keep the multiplier active. A wide variety of enemy types and the sheer number of them makes Luftrausers combat an experience that had me constantly on edge.
The Rauser can only take so much damage and to heal it you'll have to stop firing. This leads a constant juggling of offensive and defensive measures to ensure that you keep the Rauser's health high, while still maintaining the score multiplier.
In between levels the game gives you some bonus objectives beyond just attaining a new high score. These vary from simple tasks like having to kill five boats or more complex ones like falling from the sky without firing for a set period of time. Completing these leads to even more challenges being unlocked, and more importantly your also get new parts for the Rauser.
The Rauser consists of three parts: a weapon, body and engine. Luftrausers offers you quite the arsenal, some parts function in a straightforward manner while others offer some more radical benefits that at first don't seem to fit in the grand scheme of things. But it's when you start using these parts in conjunction that you end end up with some of the more amusingly powerful Rauser combinations
While it is extremely fun to play in the moment, Luftrausers stumbles somewhat in it's levelling and challenge system. It never feels as though there's enough to do and there's some weird inconsistency with the levels. Some throw an absurd amount of enemies at you in no time at all while others can get quite lonely at times, with the occasional enemy pilot poking his head around the corner and then scampering off again before you can get a shot off.
It gets quite frustrating later on when the game alternates between these two phases of in the span of a single match, making the maintaining of a multiplier nearly impossible. This does however force you into changing the Rauser's configuration into an attempt to force more enemies into the game. Luftrausers really does reward experimentation on the player's end. Every time I found a design I liked and was just getting comfortable with it would be just be a matter of time before I reached a difficulty ceiling, forcing me to adapt into an entirely new configuration and a new experience with a game I thought I had just become familiar with.
While it does invite the occasional bout of frustration and doesn't necessarily communicate some of it's more complex gameplay elements all that well, Luftrausers is still an outstanding arcade game. I've pumped numerous hours into it and yet still want to go back to it with a different Rauser configuration in an attempt to top my previous high score.
Going to go look for one