Heliobane is a vertical shoot 'em up built in the style of classic Amiga titles like Tyrian and Xenon 2. Set against the backdrop of an old orange star named Aurel and its five inhabited worlds, the game follows pilot Wren aboard the prototype gunship HB-0 Heliobane. The story centers on the Umbrine, a crystalline hive awakened inside the star that consumes fusion and has already overrun mining belts, moons, and fleets.
Gameplay
The core loop revolves around piloting a customizable gunship through fifteen stages that progress inward toward the star's heart, outward through its wake, and into the dark region called Umbra. Players equip two front guns on a rack that can be swapped instantly, along with a rear gun and two sidekick pods. Eleven weapons are available, each upgrading through five levels, and they deal kinetic, beam, or blast damage tailored to different enemy types such as black glass, sun-fed flesh, and Concord steel plating.
Grazing enemy fire builds a heat bar. At fifty heat, the Breaker fires a column that breaches enemy plating for six seconds, exposing cores for follow-up damage. Flares clear the screen of bullets and deal area damage while granting brief invulnerability. Between stages, the trader Old Mott appears in his salvage tug to buy Aurum shards, sell weapons, repair armor, and offer flares or extra lives. A death costs one level from a single weapon rather than resetting the entire loadout.
Visuals and audio emulate 1993 hardware with 320 by 256 resolution, a thirty-two color palette, parallax scrolling, tracker music, and eight-bit digitized speech. Modern features include a locked sixty frames per second, a four-pixel hitbox, remappable controls, full gamepad support, and a native Linux build.
Game Modes
The campaign runs across three worlds with fifteen stages, each concluding in a Herald boss that changes form as it breaks apart. Examples include the Quarry Maw, a mining platform turned mouth, the Leviathan Choir, a serpent of stitched drones, and Admiral Husk, a flagship bridge still broadcasting orders. Mid-bosses appear in every stage as well.
Difficulty settings are Easy, Normal, and Hard. Continues refill at the start of each new world. Progress saves automatically at every visit to the Magpie shop. Later stages introduce environmental hazards such as darkened screens, storm winds, reversed or tripled scroll speeds, narrow corridors, and branching routes through planetary graveyards. No additional modes beyond the single-player campaign and its difficulty variants are present.
Is It Worth Playing?
Heliobane targets players who enjoy precise, retro-inspired shoot 'em ups with deep weapon customization and a focused campaign structure. The heat-and-Breaker system, combined with damage-type matching against enemy armor, creates meaningful choices in loadouts. The shop system and level-loss death penalty encourage careful play without punishing experimentation too harshly.
Those seeking modern graphical fidelity or multiplayer options will find little here, as the game deliberately recreates a 1993 aesthetic and remains single-player only. The illustrated story intro, digitized voice lines across eight languages, and optional CRT or scanline filters add to the period feel while integer scaling supports contemporary displays.
Players who appreciate tight hitboxes, fast-paced vertical scrolling, and incremental upgrades across fifteen distinct stages will find a complete experience that rewards repeated runs on higher difficulties. The combination of classic presentation with responsive controls and layered mechanics makes it a strong fit for the genre's dedicated audience.
