Astroflux

About

Astroflux is a multiplayer arcade role playing shooter game with a science fiction theme. It was developed by fulafisken and was released on September 27, 2016. It received mostly positive reviews from players.

Play Astroflux - a retro styled, action packed MMO space shooter.

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67%

Audience ScoreBased on 232 reviews

gameplay11 positive mentions

story4 negative mentions

Unique top-down space flight game featuring leveling, monster hunting, boss fights, and a customizable artifact-based equipment system.
Wide variety of ships with unique strengths and weapons, plus an interesting crew leveling system that enhances groundside missions for bonuses.
Runs well on low-end PCs and offers a nostalgic retro arcade experience with a friendly community for cooperative play.

Game suffers from severe server instability, frequent lag, disconnects, and long downtime making it often unplayable.
Heavy grind and predatory monetization with essential quality of life features and key gameplay elements locked behind paywalls, creating a pay-to-win environment.
Dead or near-dead player base, with low multiplayer activity, rampant cheating issues, lack of developer support, and minimal content updates contributing to player frustration.

story
40 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
8%
82%
10%
The story mode offers a mix of storyline, timed, daily, and random missions that provide progression and rewards, but many players find the quests repetitive, grind-heavy, and sometimes frustrating due to unclear objectives and bugs affecting quest tracking. While the narrative gives a reason to explore and level up, the heavy reliance on grinding and in-game currency—often encouraging real-money purchases—dulls the overall engagement for those seeking a more seamless story experience.
- “*Storyline quests give you something to work toward as they take you through all the systems.*”
- “*You do have to grind to level up, but you do it while completing story quests, daily quests, and timed quests, so you always have something to do.*”
- “*It has a reasonable mix of short and longer length missions, so it's easy to manage your time.*”
- “Lack of information makes it a frustrating questing system and a lack of quests leave you wondering what to do but sit and kill enemies that give you 20 exp each kill and would require you to kill thousands to level.”
- “So timed quests are where your focus is spent but in timed quests they don't tell you where to go to finish it so you spend the entire duration flying in random directions trying to find out what to do.”
- “Missions get boring and repetitive eventually. I remember having a mission where I had to kill 900 enemies in a specific system, later I had to kill 300 bigger enemies and then around 100 in an even harder system, that's up to 1300!”
grinding
38 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
3%
97%
The game is widely regarded as grind-heavy, often requiring extensive time investment or real-money purchases to obtain competitive upgrades and ships, leading to a pay-to-win impression. While some players enjoy the grind and find the game fun, many find the increasing grind tedious and repetitive, which can cause boredom, especially given the game's dwindling active player base.
- “Entirely pay to win, unless you want to spend a million mindless hours grinding.”
- “You will start asking yourself what you are doing with your life, while flying this tiny little ship around grinding for nonsense.”
- “There is no way to get enough for a decent ship without a massive amount of grinding.”
gameplay
25 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
44%
48%
8%
The gameplay is generally praised for its fluid combat, diverse mechanics, and engaging progression system, combining elements like bullet hell and ARPG styles. While some find it repetitive or slow with occasional frustrating mechanics, many appreciate the depth and challenge provided by weapon variety and enemy AI. Overall, it offers an enjoyable and satisfying experience, especially for those who appreciate tactical combat and exploration.
- “The gameplay is still great; the movement, mechanics, and weapon types add enough depth to require you to at least think about how to counter specific enemies, which is more than I can say for a lot of simple games from this era.”
- “A solid overhead 2D space shooter with progression mechanics, lots of areas to explore, and fluid combat.”
- “Overall, the diversity of weapons, upgrades, and enemy AI make gameplay very enjoyable.”
monetization
15 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
20%
33%
47%
The game's monetization is widely criticized as predatory and heavily pay-to-win, with frequent expensive and overpowered items pushing players toward costly microtransactions. Many feel it operates as a cash grab, disrupting game balance and immersion, though some acknowledge the fun despite the grind and in-game purchases. Overall, the aggressive monetization strategy has driven many players away and tainted the experience.
- “However, having played this game on the web browser for a year, I can say that microtransactions do not disturb the balance between free-to-play and pay-to-play players in the game.”
- “Some people might not like this game because it is a bit of a grind and it has in-game purchases, but it is fun for what it is!”
- “For a free-to-play game, there are too many notifications and reminders that it depends on in-game purchases which really breaks immersion.”
- “Like I still love the game itself, but the extremely predatory monetization drive since it's free to play slowly killed this game. It's still somewhat active, but the only people left playing are either completely new, trolls, bots, or the occasional hardened vet that comes in once every few months to farm void blobs or something.”
- “The microtransactions are required if you want to keep playing since it gives you a better ship.”
- “This is on top of their aggravating habit of releasing an incredibly expensive and overpowered ship (which can be bought with either real money or a several month time investment to save enough of the purchasable currency through exploration and timed missions), waiting for most of the playerbase to purchase the ship, then completely nerfing it to be worse than the next overly expensive ship they plan to release, making the game feel like a constant cash grab if you wish to compete.”
music
10 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
30%
40%
30%
The music in the game is generally described as pleasant and fitting, with some users finding it peaceful and impressive. However, a few note issues with repetitive looping and overlapping tracks, especially when alt-tabbing, which can detract from the experience. Overall, the soundtrack is decent but occasionally marred by technical glitches.
- “The music is also very nice and peaceful.”
- “Music is awesome too.”
- “The ambient of the game itself is not very complex, but the music is decent enough and fits well.”
- “The music ends up looping over itself a lot of times, and you end up with two different tracks playing at the same time.”
- “Music: meh, three songs which can (and will) loop over each other if you alt tab sometimes.”
- “Blaring annoying music, horrible sound effects, confusing interface, get ganked while opening my map to look for things to do.”
graphics
6 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
50%
The graphics are praised for being accessible on low-end hardware while still offering good, vibrant visuals in a 2D world. Overall, the graphics are considered decent to brilliant, providing an enjoyable visual experience without requiring expensive hardware.
- “Runs on a toaster so most anyone can play it which is important with how expensive new hardware is. It's nice to enable users with old integrated graphics to have fun too.”
- “It's a great basic game with good visuals in a 2D world.”
- “Graphics are brilliant.”
stability
3 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The game suffers from significant stability issues, including frequent freezes and persistent animation glitches. Despite its potential, these unresolved problems have persisted for a long time, with little evident effort from developers to fix them or expand the game as promised.
- “Could have been a good game if the developers accepted new developers to their team, but they rather let a good game die than fix animation glitches and fulfill old promises to expand the game (played since November 11, 2012 on Kongregate).”
- “It freezes frequently.”
- “It is very glitchy; my firing also sticks when it glitches out like that.”
optimization
2 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
50%
50%
Optimization, particularly UI optimization, appears to be a significant issue as it previously caused framerate problems, indicating inexperienced development. While improvements may attract more players, some users feel the changes have limited impact due to the repetitive nature of rewards.
- “You know a developer is green as hell when one of their big patch notes includes 'UI optimization' because their UI caused framerate issues.”
emotional
1 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
Users find the emotional aspect intriguing due to the ships' autonomous behavior, adding a unique and immersive feel as they seem to have a mind of their own even without player input.