Devolver Digital has been making a name for themselves with publishing a variety of titles, from Hotline Miami to Shadow Warrior. Today’s game Luftrausers takes us back to the old school days, both design and graphics wise, but there’s a bit too much old school here in my opinion.
Flying High:
Luftrausers is all about the old school rush of arcade play and aiming for the high score. Loosely taking place during World War 1, it’s your job to take out as many enemies as you can before you are shot to bits.
Taking damage will start to fill the screen with white signaling damage and when the screen is completely filled, your ship is done. Healing takes place as long as you are not firing or being hit and encourages hit and run strategies.
The game takes place over an endless ocean with enemies spawning in around you. The more you kill the more things escalate starting with other fighters, planes, boats, battleships and more. Progression comes in the form of unlocking new parts for your ship via missions. You can customize your ship in three ways: The gun, the body and the engine to create your own custom ship. Unlocking parts is done by completing missions with each part having associated missions to go with it.
These missions range from killing X amount of enemies, avoiding damage and more. And they do serve to add some goals for you to go after besides just a high score.
Controlling your ship takes some getting used to as most of the engines require you to be constantly moving to keep yourself moving. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll be dog fighting with the best of them.
Luftrausers tries to be both old school in design and graphics while having modern touches with upgrades, but I do wish there was more on the modern side of things.
Going Down:
The first problem for me was that despite getting movement down, I found it very hard to aim accurately with my weapon. There is no on screen crosshair to go by and you’re only means of targeting is through the nose of your ship. When bullets are flying all over the place, this makes it very difficult to be able to focus on your ship when trying to avoid gunfire.
Weapon, body and engine changes allow you to make a variety of ships to use.
Advanced weapons that only fire a few shots at a time could really use some kind of visual indicator to let the player know when they’re ready to fire.
Another problem is the camera itself and how it adds increased difficulty to surviving. The issue is that both the player and enemy attack ranges are greater than the size of the game screen.
This means that enemies can start tracking and firing long before you’ll actually see them on screen and be ready to dodge.
Most of my deaths came from bullets zooming from off screen that tracked my ship and killed me before I could make any evasive maneuvers. Adding to the difficulty is that when you start taking damage, the game seems to stutter in an attempt to slow things down, but it just makes it difficult to start taking actions due to the time delay. There should really be some kind of a minimap or indicator to let you know that 30 bullets are about to fill the screen from a direction you had no idea from.
While the progression model of unlocking new parts was good, I would have preferred a bit more progression in terms of mechanics and challenges. You can unlock color palette swaps for the background, but I was hoping for changes to the actual gameplay. Like new environments, enemy ships or even other things to do besides fighting and surviving.
Speaking of enemy ships, the spawn rates for enemies were a bit odd. I had cases where I was constantly fending off waves of fighter planes, then the next game all I had were battleships to shoot. This is partly because of enemy spawns are based on you destroying enemies as opposed to duration alive. Adding to the difficulty is that the enemy spawn rate was inconsistent between games.
There were times where I wiped out a bunch of boats and planes and just battleships spawned. Other times I killed a group of planes and was immediately assaulted by four aces.
The problem is that the spawns definitely affect the difficulty. Being hit by more than one ace feels like suicide as their rate of fire will overwhelm even the most armored body I could access.
Bullets quickly fill the screen from a lot of directions making it difficult to dodge.
Simply put, there is too much luck and randomness in a game that is supposed to be skill based. Luftrausers tries to be both old and modern at the same time and works mostly well.
But it’s missing that next step of progression and rewarding mastery through skill with more content, not dumb luck that really makes skill based games work.
