Luftrausers

Luftrausers is an airplane-based shoot 'em up. Unlike traditional shoot 'em ups, in which the direction of the player craft is fixed, Luftrausers allows 360 degrees of motion, more akin to a multidirectional shooter. However, the player's main weapon can only fire from the front, forcing the player to take into account the position and angle of the airplane. Players must take into account the momentum of their plane while flying, using gravity and drift to maneuver as much as forward propulsion.

There is no health bar: player health is indicated by a circle around the aircraft that shrinks as damage increases and naturally regenerates when not firing the weapon.

Jan Willem Nijman of Vlambeer started Luftrausers while on the airplane home from the March 2012 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Polygon reported that he was inspired by the "beauty of his view" and did not have on-flight television. At the time, Vlambeer was finishing development on Ridiculous Fishing, a game whose development was marked by a high-profile struggle with a similar, subsequent game known as a clone.

Luftrausers is an update of Luftrauser, an earlier, free Flash game created by Vlambeer's Rami Ismail, artist Paul Veer, and composer Kozilek in the GameMaker: Studio engine and was ported to pure C++ by Michel Paulissen via his Dex converter tool. Vlambeer originally announced the game for release in Q2 2013 on PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita, having chosen those platforms due to their positive working relationship with Sony. In the weeks before the expected release, the Bangalore-based Rubiq Lab released a similar airplane dogfight game called SkyFar in April 2013 and Vlambeer contacted Apple and Google to intervene so as to avoid "another clone war". Rami Ismail's backpack containing "everything Vlambeer" including electronics and the game's code was stolen during E3 2013. Although their work was backed up, Ismail described the theft as "a giant pain".

The game received "generally favorable" reviews on all platforms, according to video game review score aggregator Metacritic.

Jake Valentine of GameZone gave the PC version nine out of ten, saying, "I could talk more and more about how enjoyable Luftrausers is, how exciting the gameplay is, how easy re-starting the game after death can be, how addicting and exhilarating the experience is, but at the end of the day, you can kill a battleship by flying your plane through it." EGMNow gave the PlayStation 3 version nine out of ten, saying, "Hearkening back to a bygone era of simple-yet-deep arcade games where you played for score, not story, Luftrausers takes basic ideas in concept and execution and turns them into hours of challenging, chaotic fun." Push Square gave the same PS3 version eight stars out of ten, calling it "a tremendously well polished action arcade package." Edge gave the PC version eight out of ten, saying that it was "surprisingly tactical".