I don’t truly want to say a bad word about Vampire Survivors. I’ve adored the many hours I’ve spent in its endearingly slapdash dungeons. It’s also responsible for spawning a thousand imitators, many of which I have also poured hours of my life into playing. But, for all of its joys and successes, I can’t defend its lack of railguns.

I don’t know what Poncle were thinking when they let you loose on a world filled with monsters and ghouls and didn’t arm you with an electromagnetic gun that launches projectiles at more than 3 km/s.

It may not be a stake doused in holy water, but I reckon the railgun in Seven Suns Of Orion would do just as good of a job against Dracula.

In Seven Suns Of Orion, the universe is under threat from an invading drone army, and it falls to you to stop them. Unlike Vampire Survivors, which challenges you to hold the hordes off for a full 30 minutes before completing a level, here you only have to survive seven. Though, when that timer hits zero, instead of an immortal reaper rushing in from the side of the screen to finish you off, here a boss enemy warps into battle. Defeat the boss and you complete level, earning yourself some sweet, sweet coins to spend on upgrades.

As with other bullet heaven games, where your weapons automatically fire on the hordes of incoming enemies, your focus in Seven Suns Of Orion is on movement. You need to keep out of reach while your weapons take care of your pursuers. As you pick up XP, you’ll unlock rail guns, homing missiles, short range lasers, flak cannons, and, my favourite, the very Expanse-evoking point defence cannons. These fast-targeting machine gun turrets fire out lead with a satisfying takka-takka noise.

Your ship is sturdy but it’s not impervious to harm. If you get caught in a swarm of drones, these small robots will peck away at your hull and split you apart into pieces of glowing space wreckage. However, unlike other games in the genre, this is a battle that takes place in space. And in space, gravity is proper weird.

Using semi-Newtonian physics, similar to the movement in Star Control, whenever you turn and accelerate your ship it maintains some of that original forward momentum. If you’ve not played Star Control, the more universal comparison is that it’s like when you see a dog you really want to pet on the other side of an ice rink but you aren’t wearing skates, so you try to slide yourself over on your tuchus. Then, when you’re halfway across the ice, the dog moves. You know how when you try to redirect to its new position by pushing yourself in the new direction your body doesn’t just make a beeline for the pup, it instead moves in an arcing trajectory? It’s just like that.

Adding to Seven Suns Of Orion’s gravitational complexities are the supermassive bodies, AKA moons and asteroids, each with their own gravity well that draws in your ship as you get near. Happily, they don’t just impact your ship, they also drag on your enemies. If you find yourself with a cloud of drones in hot pursuit as you fling your ship about the solar system, you can try a fly by of a planet and watch as the swarm pops and sizzles as the robots get pulled into its atmosphere.

When I started writing this post I’d chalked Seven Suns Of Orion as a light twist on Vampire Survivors, an afternoon’s distraction that’s easy to recommend thanks to its £4.59 price tag. But at that point, I’d only played with the Cruiser, the starter ship. You use the coins you earn in missions to buy new ships as well as upgrades, and I’d put all my earnings into increasing my base XP gain and ship’s armour. Then I read a line on the Steam Page claiming the difference between its ships weren’t “just statline changes” but that they each had “unique handling and control schemes.”

So I hopped back in, refunded by upgrades and instead bought the Galleon, just to see if it changed much about the game. It does. The Galleon is much slower and more thickly armoured than the cruiser. It also has all its gun ports on the sides, instead of the front, so rather than flying the ship straight, I had to start circling my enemies to fire at them broadside. It was as though I were piloting a pirate ship, instead of a spaceship.

Earning some more coins, I then unlocked the Fighter. This lightly armoured, fast moving ship has all its gun ports at the front. It also doesn’t have access to a lot of the heavier weapons, so as I hoovered up XP points from all the dead drones, I bought chain guns and flak cannons. I now had to create distance between myself and the chasing swarms, cut my thrusters and spin 180 degrees to pour lead into my pursuers while my ship continued to glide in its original direction, carried by my Newtonian velocity.

There’s a lot more going on in Seven Suns Of Orion than I originally gave it credit. I wish it also had more enemies and a little more colour in its environments. (Though, some of this may be down to me playing on an underpowered work laptop in the office.) But the movement alone is going to keep me coming back. I’ve four mour ships to unlock, and each promises to shake up the combat. Plus. I want to see its later levels, where there are more space oddities on show, such as suns and laser-spewing space stations.

Though, to do that, I am going to have to get better at those planetary flybys. More often than not, I clip the planet myself before being immediately overrun by all the pursuing drones.