Crucially the Rausers have enough health to survive collisions with most enemy types and they’ll even destroy the weaker ones outright, which means accidentally botching a turn and flying into something won’t ruin your day and might actually be desirable in some cases (especially if you have the Melee body part equipped). You’re still quite fragile, with three or four successive hits being enough to explode your Rauser and end your game, but whenever you’re not firing your weapon you’ll regenerate health. The human brain instinctively knows how to, for example, calculate the parabola a thrown object traces out as it flies through the air so that we can catch it, and Luftrausers relies on that same instinct to play it well.Ĭonsequently Luftrausers is quite easy to grasp, and its accessible nature is aided by it being somewhat more forgiving than most bullet hell shooters in terms of how often you can get hit. Air combat in Luftrausers is consequently all about dodging the extravagant quantities of bullets enemies fire at you long enough to find a two or three second window where you can throttle down and return fire, and this physics system, although basic, lends it a real sense of balletic grace. Do this while travelling on a sideways trajectory with a slight upward component and you can effectively strafe an enemy sitting above or below you. You can also thrust straight up, kill the throttle, and then shoot when you’ve coasted to the apex of your climb and are to all intents and purposes stationary.
Cutting the engines will see you immediately start falling towards the sea, but you’ll fall along a predictable trajectory that lets you do a 180 degree turn and line up shots on chasing enemies. When the thrust is engaged your turn rate is drastically reduced, which makes shooting enemies much harder (not to mention the fact that the baddies will likely all be behind you). However, thanks to the way this simple movement interacts with the simple physics Luftrausers allows for some very complex maneuvering. Movement is accomplished by thrusting forward, and along with left/right turning this is the only movement control existing in the game. You can enter the sea and the clouds briefly while enemies cannot, but unless you have special parts fitted to your Rauser you’ll take constant damage while you’re in them and will quickly be returned to the play field regardless, making them useful for quick escapes while ensuring they don’t confer permanent invulnerability. You can move in any direction in Luftrausers, with the play field bordered by the sea at the bottom and clouds at the top and wrapping around on itself as you move left or right. The physics system is very, very simple, simulating gravity, acceleration and momentum and not much else, but it’s enough to give the game its own unique spin.
The former is tricky (a typical game of Luftrausers lasts three minutes or less) and the latter is downright impossible, for reasons that we shall explore later, but the interesting thing about Luftrausers is how it leverages two key elements to become far more than the sum of its very simple parts.Įlement the first: the physics. It’s a bullet hell shooter with a rudimentary sense of physics at the start of each game your Rauser is launched into the sepia-toned sky above a sepia-toned ocean to battle silhouetted hordes of enemy boats and aircraft, and your only goal is to survive for as long as possible while scoring as many points as possible.
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