Longshot Universe

I went looking for a hidden gem and found something closer to a time capsule. Longshot Universe shipped out of Early Access in early 2018 and promptly fell off the radar so completely that, years later, it sits on Steam with zero user reviews and a community hub whose last real activity is someone asking whether a bundle key would work. That silence tells you something important before you even boot the game. The core concept is genuinely interesting, and I want to give it credit for that. The game frames itself as a MOBA-adjacent arena shooter set in space, where your objective is to push through to the enemy base and destroy it before the other team does the same to you. What separates it from a simple deathmatch is the ship customization layer: rather than picking a preset vessel, you assemble your own from parts, and those choices determine your playstyle in a meaningful way. Lean into agility parts and you get a nimble fighter capable of special flight maneuvers; stack armored components and you get a slow, punishment-absorbing tank. The design intention behind that system is smart and deserves acknowledgment. The spatial design is also unusual. The game is technically three-dimensional, but combat is organized across three distinct two-dimensional planes, a high lane, a mid lane, and a low lane. Moving between them is part of the tactical language, a bit like vertical lane management, and on paper it gives dogfighting a structure that pure free-roam space games sometimes lack. The Greenlight materials even described the plane-switching as enabling something like fighting-game combos within the dogfights, which is an ambitious idea from a small developer. Whether that ambition fully landed in the released version is hard to verify given the complete absence of player testimony, but the architecture shows real creative thought. The problem is everything around that core. The tower defense mode for solo and co-op play adds replayability in theory, defending your base against escalating enemy waves, but the game never found an audience to stress-test it. A Steam community post from shortly after launch mentioned a Linux install that produced only a blank landing screen with no buttons active, which is a bad sign for a cross-platform title. There is no press coverage, no Metacritic score, no community guides. For a game with multiplayer as a central pillar, an empty playerbase is not a small problem, it is the problem. You can build the most thoughtful ship in your faction and have no one to shoot at. For solo players, the co-op tower defense mode is the realistic path through the game, and it may hold up fine as a brief, low-friction session. But anyone coming for the MOBA-style PvP should know they are essentially buying potential rather than an active experience. Longshot Studios went on to develop other projects rather than push this one further, which tells you where the studio's own energy ultimately landed. I root for small studios that try ambitious hybrids on limited resources. The plane-switching dogfight structure and the part-based ship builder show that Longshot Studios was thinking creatively. But a multiplayer game with no players is a quiet room, and recommending that room to someone searching for a live arena shooter in 2026 would be doing them a disservice.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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