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Early Access begins October 30th 2025!

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Gameplay Trailer

Play THE SHMUP with a Grappling Hook

Single Player or LocCo-Op with your friends!

Cosmic Destroyer is a high-intensity horizontal SHMUP with a grappling hook. A shooter built for precision, speed, and high-stakes action. Grab enemies and objects with your grappling hook and throw them at enemies. Use it to deflect enemy bullets or open doors. Blast through tight, twisting routes in handcrafted stages. Outmaneuver swarms of enemies, smash into fortified bases, and chase down wily bosses with combat focused on intensity, clarity, and tight controls.

Power up stylized weapons, missiles, and floating options. Salvage limited superweapons from enemy wreckage. Rip enemies apart and throw them into each other. Choose from a variety of ships and upgrade secondary weapons to suit the situation. Chase perfect 1CC runs or just try to survive the chaos.

Cosmic Destroyer is fast, flashy, and brutal. It's for players who crave tight controls, pure action, and the hair-raising rush of a perfectly timed dodge.

Gameplay

Cosmic Destroyer is built on inspiration from classic arcade shoot-em-ups spanning decades. It includes classic gameplay mechanics such as power-ups, options and mega-bombs but also introduces it's own unique mechanics.

Mountable Items

Players can grab mountable items found in the stage or looted from the debris of their enemies and use them to get an edge. Examples of mountable weapons include the Laser Cannon, a Railgun, and Vulcan Cannon. These mountable items are temporary, and provide a bonus or an ability while they are active. Weapons fire along with the ship's primary weapons, and may have alternate firing when charged. Other mountable items provide passive bonuses such as speed, firing rate, hit multiplier time extensions, etc. Some of these items have trade-offs such as heavy pieces of debris that can be used to absorb bullets but also slow the player down.

Dynamic Movement in Spline-based Stages

Stages are built along splines which allow for the stage to bend, traversing around or even through asteroid caves and inside large installations. This also provides an opportunity for stages to have alternate paths and secrets.

Intuitive Controls

Controls have been streamlined so the player can focus on survival and destroying everything in their path. As many actions as possible mapped to as few buttons as possible. Currently Cosmic Destroyer uses three buttons:

Shot - fires a Wide Shot or a Focused Shot, while adjusting the player's speed. Tapping the button fires a Wide Shot which is weaker, but allows the player to move at full speed. Holding the Shot button down fires a Focused Shot that is more powerful, and also slows the player's movement speed. Focused and Wide shot also apply to any Options or Mounted Items, which will fire differently based on these fire modes. These mechanics also allow the player to dodge more effectively as well, providing situational speed modifiers.
Attach / Detach - pick up a Mountable Item from the world and attach it to your ship, or detach your currently equipped item. If you already have an item, the items will be swapped. This gives the player the choice to use or avoid items depending on their play style.
Special Attack / Bomb - release your ship's special attack. While this attack is active all damage to the player is nullified. Bombs will wipe all bullets from the screen.

Controls have been tested during development on arcade sticks, gamepads, keyboard and Steam Deck.

True to STG Fundamentals

Every effort has been made to continue to support fundamental features which STG/SHMUP fans love. This includes, (though not limited to):

Wide/Focus and Move Speed changes all on one button
Options can cancel bullets and damage enemies, helping savvy players prevent damage in scenarios and increase their score even further. Options which have absorbed bullets do more damage for a short period of time, this is visually indicated by a sparkle effect around the option as well as effects on their fired projectiles.

Do more damage at point-blank range, pure risk vs reward!
Arcade and 1CC hardcore mode - Play with limited continues in arcade mode where continuing wipes out your 1CC score chance, this mode ships generally have 2 hits to die. Or play pure 1CC hardcore where with no continues available and no health. These official modes will have Top Destroyers high score list, leader boards that will be part of the official release. Local leader boards have already been implemented for the demo version.
Practice mode - unlimited continues, full power, unlimited bombs on short cool down. In this mode you can start anywhere on any stage and practice sections and bosses.
Last but not least, the ships Bomb/Hyper saves the player if activated just shortly after starting to die. An audible percussive explosion indicates the timing, if the special button is pressed in time, the player is saved.
More features are being considered, which will be evaluated based on community interest.

Scoring and Rewards

Players rack up a big score by accumulating hits to raise their multiplier. The hit counter drains over time until the next hit is registered. This multiplier applies bonuses to nearly all scoring in the game, any points earned are scored with the multiplier that was currently active. This is not a chain mechanic where you lose your multiplier, you must hit enemies to keep it going. Here are some great ways to score:

Keep your hit multiplier up at all times by seeking out objects to hit and destroy.
Destroying enemies and destructible objects in the world will often drop score pickups. For waves of enemies, defeating the entire wave will drop a more valuable pickup. At higher multiplier tiers, additional rewards such as power ups, bombs, options are dropped. This can even include additional player lives in extreme cases.
Collecting power-ups of any kind when the category of power-ups is at it's maximum level.
Grazing bullets with your options scores bullet cancel points which can be hyper effective at close range when large numbers of bullets are being fired (such as a spiral or ring pattern turret)

When the player dies, their hit multiplier timeout is extended until the next hit is registered. This same effect applies at the beginning of a stage, so that players keep their hit multiplier going after completing a stage. Any time a continue is used the player's score and hit multiplier are wiped out.

Inspired by the classics, plus modern Quality of Life features

Along with classic FM generated sound effects, pickup announcements, and a retro "Synthwave" soundtrack, you will find graphics options to embrace the arcade era too. Scanline filters with chromatic aberration can be customized to fit the emulated monitor style you want. Whether its a slightly blurred, over-bright old CRT or the crisp and clean flat "tron" look.

Also, your ship's hit box is only your cockpit, you can see your pilot inside, but there is also an option to make the hit box a visible solid color.

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