I’m obsessed with the aesthetic, the animations, the design, the music. But despite some fun gameplay ideas that bring freshness to the shooter genre, the actual execution felt a little janky. Which isn’t a deal-breaker, since the gameplay is pretty forgiving, and I liked developer Koba’s previous release Narita Boy enough to complete it, despite some control jank in that game. This game however, runs badly. When any flying enemies come on screen there’s severe lag that affects gameplay. I don’t have a modern top of the line computer, just a 4 year old Asus ProArt laptop, but I can run full 3D games well enough. This is a pixel-art game. It seems extremely badly optimized. I can’t recommend this unless there’s a patch to fix this.

NERVA has about 250 kN of thrust at 841 seconds of specific impulse.
Merlin 1D has about 1000 kN of thrust at 311 seconds of specific impulse.
That suggests NTRs have around 4x less thrust, but around 2.7z more efficiency than chemical rockets. At a large enough scale craft, the weight of the engine could be considered irrelevant. But for smaller crafts, the Merlin has a thrust to weight ratio of 184:1, whereas NTRs only ever achieved 7:1 (they hoped to get up to around 35:1 eventually).

I imagine the thrust to weight could be substantially improved by making lightweight reactors, but I’m wondering if anybody knows anything about concepts for higher thrust NTRs?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Merlin

It’s on sale on Steam right now. Super unique strategy RPG. Combat reminds me vaguely of FTL, the story hits so hard. I played the demo on a whim and couldn’t stop. Just beat it.

I’m a huge fan of Luftrausers, but I always wanted it to be a little more than an arcade game. If you haven’t played it, it’s basically Asteroids (another favorite of mine, when I can find an original cabinet with an oscilloscope), but with gravity physics. JetLancer takes the gameplay and gives you a whole single player campaign and more complex mechanics (you get multiple weapons at once, a spin, a boost). WindRunners (of which I’ve only played the Demo) is similar, but it’s a roguelite. They’re all quite difficult, but WindRunners is both less punishing and more tedious. You have a lot of health, but so do your enemies. The two gameplay aspects that set it apart are the steering and the lack gravity in the gameplay. In both Luftrausers and JetLancer, if you don’t use your engines, you fall from the sky. In WindRunners, your plane will automatically bounce off the water. And while you have a boost button, your engines, and therefore lift, are automatic. The steering in Luftrausers and JetLancer are like the original Ateroids, where you use left and right buttons for clockwise and counterclockwise. In WindRunners, you just aim where you want to go. This makes learning it significantly easier. However, since flying and turning are basically automated, the controls feel a bit less fun to me.
WindRunners might have the most aesthetic graphics of the three. I’d wishlisted it on Steam quite a while ago. This might be somebody’s perfect game. I don’t think it’s mine. Try the demo, it’s free!