Platypus

A hand-moulded war erupts above a polluted mega-city and the quiet countryside it plans to conquer, giving this side-scrolling shooter a wonderfully odd personality. You pilot Mungola’s ageing F-27 fighter against waves of industrial invaders, enormous bosses, missiles, tanks, and airborne machines that fill the screen with colourful chaos. Platypus pairs a tongue-in-cheek premise with relentless arcade action, so its cheerful clay aesthetic never softens the pressure of surviving a crowded battlefield. The result feels like a lost coin-op classic built from plasticine rather than pixels.

Each stage pushes your craft steadily across detailed landscapes while you weave through bullet patterns, destroy enemies, and grab power-ups that improve your firepower or restore health. Controls are deliberately straightforward: movement, shooting, bomb-style screen-clearing attacks, and quick reactions carry the experience, but enemy formations demand careful positioning once the difficulty rises. Levels are short enough for repeat attempts, yet their escalating speed and boss encounters reward learning routes, conserving special weapons, and recognising attack patterns. Local two-player co-op lets a second pilot join the defence, making the action more approachable while also turning the screen into an even busier battlefield.

Its stop-motion look remains Platypus’s greatest calling card, with every plane, cloud, explosion, and landscape appearing sculpted by hand instead of generated through conventional sprite art. That visual charm is matched by a brisk, score-chasing structure that understands why old-school shooters remain satisfying: failure is immediate, restarts are fast, and improvement comes from practice rather than complicated upgrade systems. Adjustable difficulty makes it welcoming for younger players and newcomers, while higher settings offer the concentrated challenge genre veterans expect. Fans of Metal Slug’s playful visual energy, Gradius-style enemy memorisation, or classic horizontal shmups will find a compact, distinctive arcade shooter with far more character than its simple premise suggests.