Windows

Stratosphere: Conquest of the Skies

The throne room doubles as your main menu.

The focus of Stratosphere is aerial combat between flying rock fortresses.

Left to right, a jumpgate, two ships ramming each other, a distant ledge fortress, and a ground based rocket battery.

As you gather floatstone, you can upgrade your fortress on the fly.

Pull up next to a floatstone deposit, and the minerals will leap to your fortress.

The Library lets you check the specs of all the equipment you can add to your fortress.

The fortress builder allows you to construct your dream machine for multiplayer combat...

... and take it out for a test run against a variety of drones.

There are a dozen stand alone missions you can play in any order.

Once you start the campaign, the story is told through pre-mission still screens.

The initial briefing comes with a map of the region. Memorize it now because it goes blank once the mission starts.

It's not even funny how outnumbered and outgunned you are in the campaign. The first live-fire mission has you fly something that looks like this...

... against three of these beasts. As a bonus, they carry tech you won't get until eight missions later.

This message appears so often that you'll start to wonder if the playtesters understood you weren't already the world's greatest fortress pilot when you started the game.

As soon as you have a fortress capable of defending itself, you'll be assigned to escort missions. Good luck keeping these cargo jockeys alive.

Once you do overcome the 17 to 1 odds, remember that "Mission Time" doesn't include the countless reloads.