Flying across the pale yellow sky, ripping up the sea as you play chicken with gravity and edging closer to your reflection, you would think Luftrausers would be a pleasant experience - but there isn’t any time to stop and stare, as countless shells of enemy fire pursue your little Rauser.
Luftrauser is a call back to simpler times, when quarters were enough to fuel the enjoyment that you would find in your nearest arcade. When developers made games solely to create and addictive experience - even if the graphics were not sophisticated and the music repetitive - if the gameplay was entertaining enough, saving your dinner money for extra lives in the arcade was worth it. Luftrausers recaptures this play style and what seems like a simple dog-fighting, one plane against a thousand, it proves to be some of the most fun in recent times.
Piloting a Rauser (and yes, we can’t find a definition for it) across a 2D sky, it’s your job to dodge an array of enemies - including small nimble fighters, swooping jets, homing missiles, as well as small boats to submarines, battleships, and battle fortress blimps - all of which are aiming for you. It’s just a case of completing your missing till the inevitable doom crashes you from the sky, with the difficulty progressing the longer you can hold out for.
It’s important for controls to be intuitive in a twitch-reflex game such as this; they need to become second nature when facing insurmountable odds. What is an uphill battle majority of the time, can be as challenging as climbing Everest if you’re simply battling fundamentals. Thankfully, Luftrauser’s controls are simply marvelous; using either a keyboard or gamepad, it takes just a couple of attempt to get to grips with the weight of the plane. It’s not long before you’re threading the little jet through a weave of bullet-hell. Once you’re acquainted with the game, a whole host of components can be switched from the three categories; weapon, body and propulsion, changing the boost speed, the weight and the weaponry forcing you to adapt your skills as a particular body you want to use may be weak like paper. Each part has its own challenges irrespective of your rank, which can range from earning a twenty kill combo, destroying a battleship at max combo, or “simply” earning twenty-thousand points, which is fantastically hard; the only way to heal is by not shooting, but the longer you don’t shoot or kill the combo meter timer begins to run out so it becomes an art to know when to shoot and when to hold fire, and you may find some challenges may require the complementing abilities of another. A few challenges can become unbearable depending on your skill level, getting stuck on a blimp challenge was a personal nightmare; lasting long enough for one to drop in was the first step, going toe to toe with it was a whole new one, provided me with some stress but the game has a grip, the quick fire levels deliver that one-more-go attitude and closing it is simply a challenge that warrants its own objective.
Past the addictive dog-fighting, not much else is offered - but with a hundred missions and over one-hundred combinations for creating your Rauser, the game rarely stops being fun; you’ll be too bust careering into a battleships.
The minimalist soundtrack is a joy to listen to; at first, it appears there are not many tracks - but when making the first couple of changes to your Rauser, it becomes apparent that each combination has its own variant on the soundtrack. However, it can become a little repetitive if you settle on a build that caters towards your offensive or defensive style. The sound effects recall memories of Super SWIV (FIrepower 2000 in the US), an awesome shmup from 1992. Each impact can be felt.
A grand total of five colors make up Luftrausers, and it’s perfect for telling the difference between your Rauser, the vast number of enemies, and the many bullets and shells aiming to tear you a new one.
Despite the fact that completing challenges unlocks many different color palettes, the number of colors never changes. Vlambeer continues the minimalist style they first displayed in Ridiculous Fishing, though sometimes Luftrausers looks like a bad acid trip. That said, if you’re a modern gamer who didn’t grow up with retro consoles, don’t be put off by the lack of “cutting-edge” graphics: while Luftrausers employs a retro, minimalist style, it’s never less than attractive. Smoke and debris emits form your damaged rauser, growing and expanding the more damage you sustain and the reflections in the sea as you edge closer to the battleship are something to look in awe, the wavy reflection convincing you of the current, and the closer you get the higher water rips from its surface further enhancing the sense of speed. These little graphic effects enhance the feeling that you are controlling a mach 2 weapon especially when your destructive weapons rip apart enemy planes or smash the water’s surface.
Each battle is varied but not entirely different but this is a small niggle in a superb game, past completing all the missions which will take up quite a bit of your time there is not a lot on offer so a bit of variety would have been nice to see , but the challenges are a true test of skill and never seem unfair due to excellent controls and a wide range of options for creating your own deadly weapon and it’s hard to see why anyone would ever need to use more than five colors after witnessing this.
Luftrausers is an excellent game. While Ridiculous Fishing showed that Vlambeer knows how to make appealing casual fare, Luftrauser shows that they also understand the hardcore audience. On the surface it may look simple - and mechanically, it is - but in practice, Luftrausers is a game that you’ll find yourself playing over and over again.
