Kane Klenko showed that he knew what he was doing with last year’s FUSE, a game that saw its players disarming bombs in real-time by matching dice and occasionally balancing them in precarious towers. It wasn’t necessarily deep, but it produced a thick cloud of tension and banged some pot lids in your ears. By the end of its countdown, even failure was a relief. More so if you had that annoying app braying in your ears.

Even though they couldn’t be more different, Flip Ships reveals Klenko doing what he does best. Like FUSE before it, Flip Ships takes a single idea and blitzes merrily past the point where any other designer might have been content to wrap the thing into a minigame box and be done with it. Here, the idea is that just maybe the best way to defend against a Space Invaders scenario would be to launch your starfighters so that they spin like one of those barfy amusement park rides, right before rolling off the table and beneath the couch. As in, it’s the plan you resort to after everything else has failed.

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