"This one was a terrible choice yesterday, because she randomly attacks a tile," says Rami Ismail, creator of Australia Did It, hovering over a yellow raincoat-clad Meteorologist unit. "It does devastating damage on that tile, but I can't aim her, and that did not work out well for me". The Luftrausers and Nuclear Throne developer is just finishing up showing me a run of his new game before letting me have a go. "Not pre-programmed", each time he's shown the game off has been different, and it's clear he's having a blast. Wary not to spoil too much, he still can't help but show me a souped up mini-gunner that can devastate targets, teasing how "even more preposterous" units can get.
"The game is very much about curiosity," says Ismail. It's true. The desire to get your hands on the controls and play around with it all, to see what comes next, naturally ties together a set of rules that on paper could seem overwhelming. Australia Did It is a train-centric turn-based tactics game that has players defending a point while upgrading units using the goodies oncoming foes drop, like a combination of strategy RPG with tower defence – then ensuring you load back onto your locomotive in order to press forward before you get swarmed. Between each map, those same units become real-time gunners to stave off roaming enemies that criss-cross the train tracks, sequences the store page describes as "reverse bullet hell". It'd almost be too much, but each part of Australia Did It, like finely crafted clockwork, slots so seamlessly together that during play you hardly have to worry about it at all.
