Luftrausers

At this point I think my backlog of video games has nearly as many free toss-in titles from Xbox Gold and PlayStation Plus as it does games I spent money on; they've piled up quickly, and with a lot of vacation days off from work coming up to close out the year it's time to put in some series work to clear a huge chunk of them out. Here's one of the many free ones, a game I had never heard of called Luftrausers which was pretty obviously from its name and logo some kind of World War II-era flying simulator. This is much more like a little flash game than a serious flight sim; you fly around in a two dimensional airspace shooting down enemies to earn points and complete challenges, earning upgrades for your plane, allowing you to beat more challenges. The controls feel insane at first- it probably took me an hour to really get a handle on flying my plane, but after that steep learning curve the game does get pretty fun. Some challenges are pretty basic (blow up a boat, shoot down ten enemy planes in one life...) but the further you get they can become pretty creative. How, for example, could you take out ten planes without firing any weapons? Or blow up that boat by turning its own allies against it? For a game with a very small number of elements to it (there are really only like 4 or 5 different enemies and there's only one level) Luftrausers actually had a lot of depth to it; it also benefitted from lightning-quick gameplay in which you might die, choose a new upgrade, and have already started your next attempt in like three seconds. Still though after a few hours I had seen enough; as far as I can tell there is no final boss or anything, or any boss, just a whole lot of challenges, and I've never held myself to the standard of completing them all to call something 'finished', so I'll lazily call this 'beaten'.