"Stop trying to get us to make the next Fortnite, or Destiny, or Balatro," says the developer of Australia Did It, a train-based tactics tower defense reverse bullet hell: "Let us make weird things"

"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.

Rail mary

But, before you get overpowered, you must simply get powered. After selecting your train (which come with different stats – one of them in the demo being essentially an easy mode called Gravy Train), you're plonked into your first train station, with giant but weak insects such as locusts and cockroaches crawling their way turn-by-turn to damage the locomotive you and your mercenaries are tasked with protecting. Across each biome, each station comes with their own special rules – sometimes helping, such as providing firepit defenses, or potentially hindering such as limiting the types of units you can build there.

Using cindermint, dropped from foes, you can begin to draft in those mercenaries, the starting three options covering the basic principals of damage. Gunslingers deal damage in a straight line, nomads use shotguns to stun and knockback enemies in a cone, and radshots blast out irradiating beams that cause damage-over-time debuffs. Both your own and enemy units have simple to understand stats, and there's even some leeway with movement thanks to a resource-limited conveyor system that allows you to rotate your attackers around the square station wall – each one facing out to one of four grids that enemies spawn on.

At level one, your units are simple enough. Leveling up, however, revolves around merging units of the same level together on a tile to combine the properties of both. That can mean a radshot subsuming into another unit type to add rad damage on top of what else they do, or can also mean creating whole new unit types that combine or evolve the powers of both. A level two gunslinger and a level two nomad, for instance, will create a level three rocketeer, who uses a bazooka to blast out splash damage to whole groups of enemy units at range.

There are runs, but Ismail resists identifying Australia Did It as a roguelike, though he admits the "flavor" is there. There are no persistent unlocks that make the game easier like a roguelite, and while there are some card-based upgrades for your train to unlock along the way, Ismail says "they're not going to be the difference between you winning and losing."

The idea is that the game experience is self-contained every time you play a run. "If you learn how the game works, you can consistently beat the game, even if you installed the whole thing on somebody else's computer with no save," says Ismail. "I think of it as more of an arcade game."

I can't help but compare the approach to Luftrausers, Ismail's 2014 bullet hell shooter where your plane's build affected the physics of flying as well as its power – which I spent a massive amount of time playing on PS Vita. "I think Luftrausers is fairly close to Australia Did It in its philosophy," Ismail agrees. The idea of fiddling with a build remains except, rather than doing it between each run, in Australia Did It, you're mixing and matching units on-the-fly all as part of a run.

"Australia Did It very much builds on that curiosity," says Ismail. "The first time you put a rocket launcher together with a stormcaster, and you realize that the stormcaster has chain and the rocket launcher has splash – which one of those procs first makes a really big difference in how that unit works. Because you either get splashed and then anything near it gets chained, or you get chained and then whatever gets hit by the chain then does splash damage, right?" Quite how you merge units together to create higher levels always offers something unique. "Seeing people sort of go like, 'Well, what happens if… So if I did the other way around, what would happen?' That's the game for me."

Which means that, while the onslaught of enemies can sometimes feel a bit unfair, you're empowered to be just as mean back – once you're confident in the spread of souped up units you have at high level. "Some of the units are so chaotic in what they do, the combinations you can build are ridiculous, like game breaking," says Ismail, thankful they decided to go with the four grid system as it helped with balance. "You can break this game in a million ways per grid, not for all four. That's really hard to do – but for one of them, yeah, absolutely. You can build a unit where your main strategy is that unit goes to a different grid every turn and just softens the whole thing up."

Figuring out that balance – which units to use, where to place them, how to deal with increasingly complex enemy types, and when you want high level units versus multiple lower level ones, is all part of the challenge, and a matter of finding your own playstyle. "It is an arcade game. It's not a kind game," says Ismail. "It's really about not falling behind. I think the real skill check at any point is, do you have the right – I call them units, but when you think of them, really, towers – do you have the right towers with you to survive the next level? That's very much where the strategy is."

Tactical design

Australia Did It combines many different systems together playfully but in a way that makes perfect sense while I play, which feels typical of Ismail's work – but the strategy genre is something he's not tackled until now.

To the point where, when publisher Mystic Forge requested he develop them a strategy title, he was clear that though "I'm a StarCraft kid", that strategy isn't a genre he's known for, and he wasn't sure he could do it. Turns out, that's exactly why Mystic Forge wanted to see what he could do in the space. "I was like, 'Oh, so can I make something weird?' And they were like, 'Yeah!'. [...] I basically got challenged to make something interesting and new."

Having played a lot of strategy games doesn't just mean Ismail appreciates the genre, but that he's had a lot of thoughts about its design percolating in the back of his head. "I got to make a strategy game that kind of avoids my biggest frustrations with the genre," he says. "Base building is one of them, because it's literally just time-gating with some agency attached to it. In StarCraft, I'm going to build my base the same way pretty much every time, right? So my first eight minutes of that game are the same, and then I can start making choices."

His other annoyance? "Playing the whole game, losing after 30 minutes looking at the replay and then realizing that really I lost in the first two minutes. [...] When I started on [Australia Did It], I said, OK, can we make a strategy game that checks in with you every five minutes and goes 'ah that ain't it – you're definitely behind the curve here." The result is an extraordinarily quickfire take on round-based strategy that doesn't waste player time.

The variety in modes of play in Australia Did It is because "I'm fascinated by how many genres have become mechanics," says Ismail. "Roguelike is a genre and now it's a mechanic, right? Deckbuilder was a genre, and now it's a mechanic. I really like merging things, you know? It's a thing I love, the curiosity of it." Which is how smashing units together to increase their level came to be (reminding me of the puzzle canine merger, Dogpile). Rather than trend chasing, the curiosity found in Australia Did It is a result of the curiosity that comes from being given the space to play as a designer, and to synthesize his own take on a genre he loves.

"Let us make weird things, y'all," Ismail says of game development. "Stop trying to get us to make the next Fortnite, or Destiny, or Balatro, or whatever – because that thing that's apparently going to be the next hit is French right. It's Clair Obscur, an incredibly French RPG. For me, that was such a nice call back to development, to be like: OK, you know what, if I'm going to do development, I want to do it right – let's make something weird."

Ismail acknowledges Australia Did It might not vibe with everyone, but that he hoped the feeling of curiosity, to learn and master how it all works, will grab others. "Just the fact that we get to make a game that people can love or hate, instead of just being like, 'Oh yeah, it's kind of like that [other game],' that was really exciting to me."

Want to go on more runs? Our best roguelike games ranking will help – even if Australia Did It verges more on the arcade side of things.