Games Like Beltrunner

Beltrunner

One ship against the belt. Fly your ship through an asteroid belt, upgrade it in the hangar, survive dangerous space events, and beat the bullet-hell boss at the end of each sector. Play alone or with up to eight players. When you clear the first three sectors, two endless modes open: The Void (Endless), where you survive as long as you can, and Event Horizon (Waves), where you fight wave after wave inside a ring you can't leave.

What is Beltrunner?

Beltrunner is a roguelite space shooter. It mixes three kinds of games:

You only steer. Your weapons fire by themselves. Each sector is an 8 to 10 minute fight to stay alive. Over time, more asteroids appear, enemy ships arrive, and space itself turns against you. When you level up during a run, you pick new weapons and upgrades. Between runs, you spend the Scrap you collected on permanent ship upgrades. Boss attacks get harder as the boss loses health, so you have to keep moving.

Features

Upgrade your ship in the hangar. Collect Scrap in every run. Between runs, spend it on permanent upgrades: a stronger hull, stronger guns, more luck, more weapon slots, and even a one-time escape pod. Unlock eleven different ships, from the Skiff you start with to the Sovereign flagship. Each one plays differently. Fly through seven sectors. After the third sector, the map splits into two paths, and each path ends in a harder sector. Survive space events. Eighteen events can happen during a run: black holes that pull everything in, rotating pulsar beams, moving walls of plasma, gamma-ray bursts that charge up before they fire, toxic clouds with loot inside, ion storms that slow down your weapons, and a drifting planet you can hide behind. There are also pirate ambushes, elite raiders, and a huge Dreadnought warship you must destroy before it escapes. Build your weapons. You steer, and your weapons do the shooting. Choose from thirty weapons, from the basic Pulse Blaster to legendary weapons like the Singularity Core and the Solar Annihilator. Max out a weapon while you hold the right attachment, and it can evolve into one of twenty-one much stronger weapons. Beat the bullet-hell bosses. At the end of each sector, a giant boss appears. There are five of them: Kernabos the Locust, Pulsar Heart, the Broodmother, the Leviathan, and Ouroboros. The last two sectors bring back the Leviathan and Ouroboros with much more health. Each boss has several phases, and it gets faster and more dangerous as it breaks apart. Dodge the rings, spirals, and beams, and destroy it. Every run is different. Each run starts from a random seed, so the belt is never the same. Each level-up gives you three upgrade cards to choose from, and rarer cards show up less often. You can reroll cards, or banish the ones you don't want. Enemies, events, and loot are random every time. Two endless modes. In The Void, there is no timer: survive as long as you can while bosses keep coming. In Event Horizon, you fight wave after wave inside a ring you can't leave, with a daily run where everyone plays the same arena. Both have high-score boards.

Play with friends

The belt is more fun with friends. Play with up to seven friends and join through a Steam lobby with one click. Each player picks their own upgrade cards, so every ship in the team ends up different. One player can hold a line with a Rail Driver, another can hit enemies on the side with Tesla Arcs, and a third can fire missiles from far away. Risky, one-sided builds that would fail alone can work very well in a team. The game also gets harder with more players: asteroids and enemies are tougher for each extra player. Nobody has to sit out. If your ship goes down, you come back twenty seconds later, as long as a teammate is still flying. Beating a boss brings the whole team back. You can always see your teammates' names, ships, and last known positions. The run only ends when every ship is destroyed, so protect each other.

Weapons

You start with four weapon slots and four attachment slots. You can get up to seven of each: buy both levels of Expanded Bays in the hangar and fly a ship that has an extra slot. All weapons fire on their own. What you choose is which weapons fire. Every card you take fills a slot, so you have fewer choices later, but your build gets more dangerous.

Legendaries

There are nine legendary weapons, and they are the rarest cards in the game. A common card is forty times more likely to show up. You can improve your chances with Luck from the hangar and with jackpots during a run. Legendaries take much longer to recharge than other weapons (tens of seconds, not a few seconds), only go up to level 6, and never evolve. They don't need to.

Evolutions

Max out a weapon while you hold its matching attachment, and the next chest can combine them. There are twenty-one evolutions, one for each base weapon. An evolved weapon is a whole new weapon in the same slot. It can't evolve again, so once your build is finished, it stays finished.

Weapon and attachment pairs

Each of the twenty-one base weapons has a matching attachment. This table shows what each pair evolves into. Weapons max out at level 8 in the sectors, level 10 in The Void, and level 12 in Event Horizon. Attachments max out at level 6 or 7. Attachment bonuses are per level. Weapon Matching attachment Evolves into Pulse Blaster Targeting Array (+15% range) Nova Lance Scatter Cannon Overclocked Coils (-7% cooldown) Meteor Storm Mining Laser Focus Lens (+11% damage) Solar Lance Orbital Shards Gyro Stabilizer (+15% area) Ring of Ruin Proximity Mines Volatile Payload (+12% explosion & area) Singularity Mines Missile Pod Guidance Chip (+12% projectile speed) Hydra Barrage Ion Wave Deflector Plating (+3% damage reduction) Pulsar Burst Comet Flail Tether Coupling (+15% projectile duration) Twin Comets Tail Gun Afterburner Injector (+5% move speed) Plasma Wake Tesla Arc Capacitor Bank (-6% cooldown) Storm Cage Cryo Sprayer Coolant Loop (+12 hull, +0.5 hull/s) Absolute Zero Attack Drones Drone Uplink (+1 projectile every 2 levels) Swarm Protocol Rail Driver Lucky Beacon (+3% crit chance) Annihilator Rail Ricochet Disc Slipstream Coil (+2% damage per 100 speed) Sawblade Storm Flak Cannon Shrapnel Casing (+1 pierce every 2 levels) Cluster Barrage Graviton Snare Salvage Magnet (+18% pickup range) Event Horizon Sentry Pod Fabricator Core (+12% turret, drone, mine & well damage) Overwatch Grid Plasma Torch Catalyst Coil (+18% effect strength & duration) Inferno Lance Momentum Driver Thruster Array (+25% boost capacity) Relativistic Driver Reaper Cannon Overcharge Cell (+0.30x crit damage) Executioner Salvage Halo Survey Scanner (+10% XP) Debris Storm Three more weapons never show up on cards: the Ram Prow, the Aegis Array, and the Harpoon Tether. They come built into the ships that carry them, and they level up like your other weapons.

Events

Space doesn't wait for you. The longer a run goes, the more the belt throws at you: dangers to survive and enemies to hunt.

Space hazards

Enemy events

Endless modes

Clear Hostile Space, the third sector, and two endless modes open at the same time: The Void and Event Horizon. They are two different games, and you can play them in any order.

The Void

There is no timer here. Survive as long as you can. Over time, more asteroids and more elite enemies appear, and every seven minutes a full-power boss arrives. It is picked at random from the five sector bosses, and it gets stronger each time it comes back. Every boss you beat drops loot and keeps the run going. When your hull reaches zero, the run is over. How long can you survive? Beltrunner saves your best survival time and top scores, and there are milestones for lasting 10, 20, 30, and 60 minutes in The Void. Set a record, then beat it.

Event Horizon

Event Horizon is a wave arena. You fight inside a ring, and enemies come in numbered waves. There is no timer, and the run ends when your ship is destroyed. The wave you reach shows how long you lasted. Your score shows how well you flew.

Daily run. Besides the free run, there is a daily run. Everyone gets the same arena for one day, with its own leaderboard. You can play it again, but only your first run counts. Event Horizon works in co-op too. There are achievements for reaching waves 5, 10, 20, and 45, and for challenges like clearing 15 waves without breaking the chain.