As another game of Luftrausers ends with an unplanned explosion, a single thought persists; I can do better. How, is a matter of conflict. I mean, I know I can improve upon my previous performance, but I’m not quite sure how to refine and appropriate technique inside the myriad of presented options. This leads to a persistent duel between confidence and doubt where improvement is reliant on a preference between, for example, an infinitely-blasting pinpoint laser and a monster canon outputting insane damage. Providing the player with heaps of options to tackle problems is nothing new. Creating a large number of choices and making each one uniquely viable? That’s special, and it’s Luftrausers’ specialty.
Luftrausers is an arcade-style 2D shooter from Vlambeer, a two-person development team best known for iOS standouts Super Crate Box and Ridiculous Fishing. Like its brethren, Luftrausers deceives the eyes with a seemingly sterile, lo-fi presentation before assaulting the body and mind with simple and elegant mechanics wrapped inside challenges cleanly designed to push any perceived personal limit. Literally stated, Luftrausers is an absurdist dog-fighting simulator where the player-controlled aircraft and must obliterate the opposition while avoiding enemy fire. And it welcomes and rewards varying degrees of approach.
Everything in sight begs to be destroyed. Smaller planes are in great supply, but offer paltry resistance and few points. Medium-sized boats are affixed to the water they’re born in, but belt out more damaging fire. They’re quickly joined by kamikaze-crazy jets, missiles launched by submarines, hunting jets called aces, giant hulking battleships with massive guns, and – why not – a massive flying fortress affectionately known as a blimp. Every piece of opposition opens fire on the player, rendering the open-air a fluctuating maze of assorted gun fire.
What makes Luftrausers so much damn fun is its loose and yet demanding approach to player-control. The default ship behaves like a monkey fired out of a giant slingshot. Limiting control to turning clockwise and counterclockwise and a thrust button initially feels inarticulate and dodgy, but once inertia is learned and thrust is appreciated, it transitions to art of higher learning. It’s like you’re constantly trying to manage a slingshotting projectile, all the while dancing between gunfire and lining up shots against anything within range. The map’s top and bottom, sky and water, respectively, serve as boundaries that slowly damage the player. Basically, everything in Luftrausers aches to kill you.
Drawing the bulk of its influence from Asteroids, Luftrausers’ persistent draw is pursuit of a high-score. Each member of your opposition offers a base score value. Better, vanquishing foes in succession builds into a multiplier with a maximum of twenty. Keeping your finger locked to the fire button is in your best interest, or at least it seems that way until your aircraft is on fire and on the verge of destruction. The only way to heal is to take your finger off the fire button, a maneuver which quickly gathers health but also removes your chance at building your multiplier. That is, unless you vanquish enemies by ramming through them, or turning and burning them with your engine. The push and pull between offense and defense is the center of Luftrausers’ scoring mechanic, and also the source of greatest triumphs and most humbling personal defeats.
The dangerous hinge upon which Luftrausers balances confidence and doubt? A bunch of customization options; the weapon, engine, and body types of your craft can be unlocked and combined to form different craft variants. Perhaps you’d like your weapon to be a Contra’s signature spread-gun, or four damaging homing missiles. Would you prefer a body that sets off a score-boosting nuclear explosion upon destruction, or maybe one that trades quickness and maneuverability for heavy armor plating? What about an engine that disregards the pull of gravity in exchange for slower acceleration, or one that doesn’t take damage under water but doubles damage from the top of the sky? After unlocking everything, Luftrausers boasts 125 potential combinations, each of which boasting a hilariously appropriate name like, “holy diver,” “batman,” and “beamrauser.”
The desire to find the best aircraft combination is the core of Luftrausers’ appeal. Like questioning the nature of god or determining what goes best on ice cream, it’s hard to come to terms with just one answer. For example, I found a body that didn’t take damage from melee attacks, along with the slow-fire super canon weapon and the engine that didn’t take damage from water to be particularly effective at neutralizing huge battleships. Building my multiplier was a bit of a problem as I couldn’t dogfight for anything, but it really helped my stay alive through what, previously, was my largest threat. Later, my combination of the laser weapon along with the armored body and superboost engine seemed perfectly adept to managing the chaos of the skies. Every part seems to contribute to some greater understanding of Luftrausers’ combat.
At its core Luftrausers is about managing the chaos constantly inflicted upon the player. The rules by which it operates are rigid, but unloaded in random intervals. Sometimes aces will drop by after the opening thirty seconds, and sometimes it’s a plethora of battleships. Sometimes you’re assaulted by a combination of jets and submarine missiles. Sometimes it seems to hit you with everything it’s got (down the line there’s even a special mode that pushes that to the extreme). While not as deep or replayable as something like Spelunky, Luftrausers’ variable challenges provide an alluring sensation of randomness, which, at the very least, ensures that what killed you last time probably won’t be the same thing that kills you next time.
Luftrausers isn’t all about chasing a single high score. Affixed to every optional part is a list of challenges unique to that particular part. Most of these are simple tasks, like killing a set-number of enemies. Others present more varied challenges, like downing ships while you’re on fire, taking out an ace with your multiplier maxed out, or killing thirty enemies without letting off the trigger. Meeting these goals seems to unlock other goals which, in turn, wind up unlocking pallet swaps for Luftrausers’ modest visuals. There’s also an all-encompassing player-level that your scores accumulate into and build, although strangely it maxes out at just ten – which I met after playing for about three hours.
Luftrausers’ visual presentation, mirroring its general design, is simple but effective. The sepia-toned chaos offers clear definition of your surroundings, although the aforementioned kaleidoscope of pallet swaps are there if you need a bit of color in your rausing. The biggest takeaway, however, lies with the audio assault provided by KOZILEK. Somehow efficiently merging chip tunes, elements of dubstep, and thematic ties to an enigmatic evil empire, it’s a bumping grind of harsh drum blasts and giant-stomping electronic music. Perhaps the most impressive aspect is the entire soundtrack seems composed of bits and pieces unique to each plane combination, promoting a musical assembly reflective of your particular style of play. Somehow it’s all thematically consistent, cleverly concealing the incredible amount of time it must have taken to construct. Luftrausers certainly didn’t need one of the most addicting and skillfully composed soundtracks of the year, but my god is it all the better for it.
Control options also deserve a mention. I found Luftrausers to be at its best with the keyboard; by default the left and right arrow keys managed rotation, up was thrust, and X was fire. Typically I’m more at home with a controller, but in the case of Luftrausers I couldn’t reconcile the analog-stick’s responsibility of both direction and thrust. It seemed impossible to turn and thrust properly, or at least it seemed difficulty under default circumstances. This obviously isn’t a problem with the PC version, but it makes me wonder how control will be handled with the PlayStation 3 and Vita release.
