Airships: Lost Flotilla

"Its just kind of bland, and difficult in a way that does not feel rewarding." It pretty much sums this up.

Effin A this guy can make a freakin game yall. I was thinking i was just showing love for the dev by picking this up, as i am so incredibly burned out on survivor games, but ill be damned I love it. Hard to put your finger on what exactly this nails so hard, pacing i guess? but sure as hell its a bopper

It doesn't look like much and yet it's one of the most bizarrely addictive autofire roguelites I've ever played. Each of the many, many ships has different stats, gimmicks, and slots to put weapons, escorts, and modules in as well as different captains with even more passives. Making different builds is quite fun and being able to pick what enemies you fight in the node based roguelite path helps you avoid bringing specialized builds to fights you can never win. The upgrade system mid-run is fun, too as it's based on two resources, one of which can be recouped by selling back the stuff you already have to replace with other stuff and the other of which is mostly for buying passive upgrades. The weapons, escorts, and modules themselves can be upgraded to better versions with money and they often have different upgrade paths, too. Lastly, the metaprogression isn't strength based unlike other roguelites so you won't really feel like the difficulty is unbalanced due to its existence. It mostly consists of filling out a bestiary full of lore with some interesting secret codes to find and some of the bestiary entries unlock new ships and captains. The research progresses by you killing the enemy type that's being researched or by "researching in the background" which causes things to be researched in real time (the game gives you a date and time in real life for when the research will finish) so you don't have to fight rare enemies or enemies you simply hate fighting. You might be disappointed coming from Airships: Conquer the Skies but that's a given considering this spinoff is a game in a completely different genre. The lore, vibes, and charm of Airships: CtS are still here and even some of the game design and there's a surprising amount of variety in its gameplay.

Airships lost Flotilla is a vey nice and creative game. It gives a ton of ships models and a variety of equipment so the player can build and design whatever he himself desires without any restructions. I highly suggest this game as I personally enjoyed every minute of it.

Steampunk Airship Vampire Survivors. Buy upgrades between missions. Roguelite progression and a branching campaign map. Good enemy variety. Good ship build variety. Upgrades are hidden in the journal. Start playing on Easy, I'm not sure Hard is possible.

I can't explain why this game is so fun, but it is.

Pretty good, I'll prefer spaceships, but airships are cool too. Runs pretty light as well. One thing that stands out from other similar games that I like is that it has the airship aesthetic right, but it also actually feels like you're flying an airship around, i.e. it has turn rate and your ship actually takes time to turn. So far it isn't really an issue, but I heard there are some ships I haven't yet unlocked that are really sluggish and it's something you have to take into account. As is, so far for me, the main advantage is you can actually feel the difference between a fast small gunboat and a big heavy battleship. There are also some omindirectional movement ships/copters too where it just moves near instantly. Oh and there are also planes where you cannot stop and have to keep flying, so that's pretty cool. It makes it all feel real. Side note, using mouse movement lets you play the whole game just using the mouse, the ship goes towards your cursor, what that also means is that if you want to stop, the keyboard commands don't work, instead put your cursor above your ship and it'll stop. Also opening menu/pause is left click. It's actually pretty sweet that you can run the whole game just using your mouse. Most others would still go with esc only for opening the menu. Weapon selection is pretty nice too, with a wide variety, and then you can upgrade most weapons into two distinct paths. Like the Guided Missile, one of my favorites. It can go into Swarm Missiles that trades range and damage for sheer volume of fire, or Thermobaric Missile which increases it's AOE and sets things on fire. You then also have module slots which allows you to further customize your ship, sometimes even giving them some new capabilities. Like iirc the Alchemy or something module that at base just increases the potency of your explosive weapons, but can be upgraded where now your exploding/AOE weapons now also stuns or fears your enemies. Then there are escorts, mostly not that sexy honestly, but if you want to play a minion class, these are for you. There are some interesting stuff there though, like if you don't have the module slots for shield generators, you can pickup a shield ship instead that does similar while providing other bonuses. Though it also depends, some escorts stick right next to you, these aren't that nice it feels, but there are also those which just roams out to kill, they are like long range weapons. Useful depending on enemies, like when there are those you want to stay away from. Those above are basically slot limited depending on your airship, but there are also passives you can pickup, these are unlimited, though they get more costly as you start stacking them. Mostly they are either just pure stat upgrades or stat tradeoffs, but here there too are interesting stuff, like iirc there is one where you apply an effect, iirc fire, then it also applies another effect, iirc stun. Basically lets you start stacking effects on enemies. There is also an Air Manual thing, i.e. the bestiary among other things, it provides lore, and also stats of enemies. And the interesting part here is that to unlock pages, you can either find the relevant things in game, or enter a code if you can acquire it from somewhere, perhaps from the Steam Guide section. Many of these pages would then have a challenge you must complete in order to unlock new stuff for your runs, basically everything, from ships, captains, to all the stuff you can pickup in a run. And another interesting thing here is you can set them to do research too, i.e. leave it running offline and when it completes the challenge is just marked as complete. This means if there are any annoying challenges that just doesn't fit your playstyle, heavily relies on RNG or otherwise you just don't want to do, you can still slowly unlock them anyway. Though I dunno why they do not have a glossary, like it doesn't explain what fear or armor does exactly for example, you can kinda figure it out just from the name, but it doesn't give you the details. And the map is also annoying to look at because you cannot just scroll/pan, you can actually see the whole map, just click the nodes and it recenters, but it is more annoying compared to just panning it. Also you cannot save mid-run, a run takes around 20 minutes, 60 seconds per node iirc and 20 nodes. Though you can pause, even mid-combat, and the game does run light enough that you can just leave it in the background. So it's more a minor annoyance than anything.

Good game & time killer. Deep enough to entertain yet simple enough to just play to de-stress. I wish it had an infinite mode though.