Luftrausers flash free#

This seems like an obvious advantage, but a timer-based combo system encourages us to seek danger instead of avoid it, and the sheer number of enemies makes not firing a dismal prospect. In Luftrausers, your ship automatically and continuously heals itself as long as you’re not firing. The Penguin handles differently than the Widowmaker, but Luftrausers is all about using control and timing to find gaps in enemies’ bullet-hell eruptions, fire back and then flit away like a trapeze artist.Ĭareening through the flak-lousy sky is dangerous, though. The trick is that rausers are almost invariably fast: You can pierce through the fray, cut the engines, flip the nose around, and let your momentum carry you as you fire backwards into the crowd before kicking the engines back on and zooming off to resume the fight in any of the 360 directions. My personal favorite is the Nuke: a posthumous middle finger to my enemies that detonates during my inevitable death. The Gungine (gun engine) fires bullets from some aft torpedo bay while an armored body trades speed for protection. Different engines and fuselage types round out Luftrausers’ customization options, each with their own deficiencies and strategies. Maybe it’s all physics engines and audio-visual feedback, but that knowledge doesn’t make gloriously swandiving through a hail of bullets less satisfying.Ĭontrolling a rauser is straightforward: pressing “up” engages the thrusters while “x” fires whichever of the half-dozen guns (think lasers and homing missiles) at your disposal you’ve chosen. The fighter jets in Luftrausers have weight and tension. Vlambeer has made a name for itself through an uncanny ability make games feel good. “PRESS UP TO RAUS!” exhorts the tutorial.

Within the dyspeptic, Strangelovian alt-history world of Luftrausers, however, raus is a verb: to glide, swoop, and pirouette with balletic grace, to cleave through enemy bombers and aircraft carriers, to play Vlambeer’s new aerial combat game. A cursory Google leads to a Dutch-language wikitionary page which suggests that raus is a Nyonorsk noun, meaning “rage.” “Airbeserker” makes for a roughhewn calque, dubious etymological integrity notwithstanding. Luft seems obvious enough, but raus is unclear. Then, once the fish reach the surface, they are flung high into the air, and you blast them out of the sky with a shotgun, like any ridiculous fisherman would.“ Luftrausers” is most likely a nonsense word, evocative of the jackbooted Air Forces of World War II without directly evoking them or their baggage. At this point, the lure begins reeling back in, and your goal is to hook as many other fish as you can on your way back up, avoiding jellyfish along the way. In the first, you attempt to get your lure as far down in the water as possible, avoiding fish (or smashing through them) until you manage to hook one fish. Fortunately, fans motivated the developers to continue work on their own game, and the official Ridiculous Fishing release outshined the clone in every possible way. but unfortunately, they were beaten to the punch by another developer who cloned their design – a now-common problem in mobile development – and released it well ahead of Ridiculous Fishing. Vlambeer would later go on to revisit Radical Fishing with an updated mobile version called Ridiculous Fishing, released in 2013. It takes a while to get the hang of this control scheme, particularly since you must continue to deal with inertia and gravity, but once you do, you’ll be pulling off impossible aerial acrobatics and blasting away enemies in all directions. This means that players can rocket forward in a straight line, spin the plane around, and then rocket off in that direction. Rather than giving the player direct control over his plane in the traditional sense, Luftrausers offers only the ability to turn and to thrust. Flying through either will steadily drain your health and repel you, turning your plane back toward the playing field.

Players are bounded by a thick layer of clouds at the top of the screen, and a body of water at the bottom.

Luftrausers flash free#

You are free to fly about in any direction, soaring high into the sky, skimming across the water (with a nice spray effect behind you), and jetting along horizontally in an infinite loop. Luftrausers sets itself apart from other shooters with its wild controls and over-the-top weaponry and customizations.