Airships: Lost Flotilla is a perfect time-killer where you can make some ridiculous ships

Airships: Lost Flotilla is a steampunk themed auto-shooter just released from David Stark, an offshoot of their other game Airships: Conquer the Skies and it's simply great. Disclosure: the publisher Metaroot sent me a key.

Following in the footsteps of Vampire Survivors, Brotato and all the others that have come along that in some way fit into this bullet heaven genre, you probably already know a lot of what to expect from a game like this. You go through waves of enemies against a timer, trying to survive to make it to the next wave, so you can upgrade and keep pushing further.

Here you're piloting a steampunk airship of some sort, and gradually adding more weapons and buffs to make the most ridiculous build you possibly can. Like a ship that has a cannon, a giant saw blade and…tentacles (because why the hell not it looks cool!).

When you manage to complete a wave, you then get to go through various ship upgrades. This could be entirely new weapons, ability buffs you can repeatedly train, weapon level upgrades and other modules to install. There's quite a lot to pick from, and you really can make some varied builds once you start unlocking more ships that have more space on them. Bigger isn't always better though. The smaller ships are speedy, while the bigger ships are sluggish and quite challenging to play as.

Trying out all the hundreds of different combinations has been exceptionally fun, the key to this game really is the variety in all the builds to keep trying something new.

Weapons having two different upgrade paths for each of them is a nice touch too. So even if you pick the same weapons one run, you could upgrade them an entirely different way in another run.

After going through the upgrades, it's time to pick a path across the map. This part is what I really like about the game, because it makes you think and try to plan a little. Each location offers up something different in terms of risk versus reward. You might want to pick an easy path just to get further, or risk it for more research and different types of rewards available to progress in other ways.

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Once you get further in, the game opens up a little more too with all the different types of enemies with their various weapons and attack patterns. Then add to that there's some environmental interactions too like clouds that can help reduce fire but also visibility, sandstorms that push you around and more.

The boss battles can be pretty insane too, and thoroughly challenging. The game as a whole is pretty challenging though, although I've been playing it on the middle difficulty which does feel about right.

Quite accessible too since not only does your ship auto-fire but you can make it so it powers forwards by itself, with you only needing to control left and right. Easy one-handed gaming.

While it's not much to look at, with some truly basic artwork for a lot of it, Airships: Lost Flotilla is a perfect time-killer for when you've got a few minutes spare but it can easily sink your entire evening.

Airships: Lost Flotilla has Native Linux support and Valve rated it Steam Deck Verified.