Proxy Air Force

I have a soft spot for the kind of tiny solo projects that slip onto Steam without fanfare, built by one person who clearly wanted to make the thing they loved as a kid. Proxy Air Force sits squarely in that tradition: a vertically scrolling shoot-em-up where you pilot the F 46 II Special through waves of enemy fighter jets, turrets, and military structures, set against a fictional US-versus-CES wartime backdrop. It is a micro-budget love letter to the arcade era, and the sincerity is genuinely apparent. But sincerity and playability are not always the same thing, and this is where the conversation gets complicated. The core loop is about as stripped back as the genre allows. You have one aircraft, one firing mode, and the mission to blast through several short levels of increasingly dense enemy formations. The game leans toward bullet hell density, with dozens of projectiles filling the screen at once, but compensates by giving your plane a generous health bar and fairly frequent health replenishments along the way. What that trade-off actually means in practice is that the tension a proper bullet hell relies on never quite materialises. You are less dodging on instinct and more absorbing punishment while holding the fire button. Powerups do appear and responsive controls make picking them up feel satisfying in a low-stakes, breezy way. There is one design quirk that will genuinely frustrate rather than challenge: waves of fighters occasionally fly in from behind with a "Warning" prompt that gives you almost no time to reposition. The spacing between them is tight and their entry positions shift between runs, which means surviving them leans more on memorisation and luck than readable design. It is a rough edge that a little telegraphing would have smoothed out completely. The level variety is also thin, and with only a handful of stages the whole thing wraps up in well under an hour. A solitary aircraft with no unlockable variants or difficulty settings means there is almost no reason to return once the credits roll. Where the game does quietly impress is in a couple of smaller details. The music sits in an interesting middle ground, more polished and modern-sounding than the pixel art visuals suggest, which creates a slightly odd tonal mix but is genuinely pleasant to listen to through headphones. The art has a cartoony, colourful quality that keeps things cheerful rather than grim. And the whole package runs on very modest hardware, which matters if you are on an older Linux machine or a low-spec Windows build. Anamik Majumdar is a prolific solo developer who spans platformers, horror games, and now shmups, and there is real craft growth visible even in a project this compact. For most shmup fans, the depth just is not there. If the genre is new to you and you want the simplest possible on-ramp with zero learning curve, this might serve that niche. If you have spent any real time with vertical shooters, you will recognise that you have been here before, and done more with it. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified.

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