LUFTRAUSERS (the title is, apparently, all caps) is a very simple 2D arcade-style game. You control a plane which flies around and shoots enemy planes. Unlike a schmup, where you proceed left-to-right or top-to-bottom, this is a side view, looking at a plane flying over an ocean, dogfighting vertically and firing on boats below.
The game has a highly non-standard control scheme – you can fire, you can boost, and you can pitch your plane up and down, in a full 360 degree circle. The controls are very simple and kind of unusual, but you get the hang of them after a while.
The game has 8 different enemy types – basic planes, a nastier kind of plane, giant blimps, basic boats, submarines, battleships, and two rare enemy types which almost never spawn. You will encounter them all in fairly short order, and at that point, you’ve seen all that the game really has to offer – there is an alternate mode which is basically a bullet hell mode, but even the regular mode can start bordering on that at times.
You can customize your plane with five different weapons, five different bodies, and five different engines, each of which alter the gameplay of the game in reasonably significant ways, but ultimately the variety granted by these unlockable parts wears off after a short while. There are in-game missions which allow you to unlock parts and color schemes, each of which is attached to one of the parts, with each part having six such missions attached to it. If you beat all the missions, you unlock a final, alternate plane.
Really, this game is decent enough gameplay wise, but it just doesn’t have much depth to it. It is really simple and there just isn’t much variety to it in the end, so you’re likely to get bored with it after a short time.
If you got it as part of a bundle or something, it might be worth looking at, but it just isn’t worth buying – it just feels too simple to feel like an adequate stand-alone game.
2.0