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Luftrausers is, above all other things, a 2D shooter of ferocity and focus. And yet - look at this - I've just constructed a Luftrausers plane that doesn't shoot. Well, I've constructed one where shooting isn't the main strength, anyway. Being a submarine is the main strength of this particular beauty - an unusual agenda for an aircraft, granted, but then, Luftrausers is a gloriously unusual game. Testify!Vlambeer's latest really doesn't screw around. Each launch fires you vertically out of the internal pipework of a hulking submarine and high into the clouds that scatter across a sepia sky so that you can be swiftly blown to pieces. The control system is the same turn-and-thrust blaster set-up made famous by Asteroids, but it's tethered here to a score-attack game with a hungry sense of earthly gravity - a game that's always longing to pull you back to the depths as you spin through the ether, turning this way and that, blowing apart enemy forces that start with swarms of puny mosquitoes before speedily escalating to include gunboats, precision jets, giant battleships and far, far worse. You know Vlambeer bullets, right? They're big and chunky and luminous. In Luftrausers, there are an awful lot of them.
If this was all there was to Luftrausers, it would be more than enough. Baddies flock and dart around you, and your plane, while behaving like no plane that's ever taken to the air in real life, handles like a fighter from the glorious old days of flying-ace cinema instead - a hot, steel-riveted conceit. You can fling it about with rakish flair, pulling off sudden turns and screeching dives. And, in a tweak that's all Vlambeer's own, you can even dunk it under the ocean or up through a deadly layer of clouds that block the higher reaches of the atmosphere. Then you can bounce it back out again, facing the opposite direction and spitting flame at anyone nearby who will feed your all-consuming combo meter. You're ceaselessly fighting the pull of the earth as well as your mechanised foes in Luftrausers, and you can almost feel the stress being applied to all those shuddering bolts and struts and stretches of canvas. It's electrifying to chuck such a fragile assemblage through the sky. No wonder they used to refer to these things as kites.
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