Epic Games Store free games: Astral Ascent and LUFTRAUSERS

The Epic Games Store free games for this week went live at 15:00 UTC on 10 September and come off the counter at 15:00 UTC on 17 September. There are two of them, and they could hardly be less alike: Astral Ascent is a 2023 action roguelite with one of the better reputations in a crowded genre, and LUFTRAUSERS is a twelve-year-old arcade dogfighter you can learn in about ninety seconds.

Both are worth claiming, because claiming costs nothing but a click. Whether either is worth installing is the more useful question, and the answer is different for each.

What the Epic Games Store free games are this week

Astral Ascent is made by Hibernian Workshop and came out in November 2023 after a long early-access run. It sits at 95% positive on Steam across more than 8,500 reviews, with a Metacritic score of 86 — numbers that put it in the upper tier of a genre where most releases land somewhere around "fine".

LUFTRAUSERS is a Vlambeer game published by Devolver Digital, released in March 2014. It is 91% positive across roughly 4,500 Steam reviews, with a Metacritic of 80. It is also a very small download built around a single, very good idea.

Astral Ascent runs on spells rather than weapon pickups — each of the four heroes has dozens to unlock, and a run is about what your chosen set does together. (Official Steam screenshot)

Astral Ascent is the one to actually install

The pitch is a 2D roguelite set in a prison called the Garden, guarded by twelve Zodiac bosses spread across four worlds. You pick one of four characters — an assassin, a brawler, a gem-throwing sculptor, a summoner — and fight your way up. So far, so familiar.

What separates it is that the build comes from spells rather than from whatever weapon the run handed you. Each hero has dozens to unlock, and the interesting decision is not which single spell is strongest but which set holds together. By the third or fourth run you are choosing the option that talks to the other three rather than the one with the biggest number.

It also has genuine two-player local co-op, plus online through Steam's Remote Play Together, which is rarer in this genre than it should be — most roguelites are built around one player's attention. If you have someone on the sofa, that alone justifies the claim.

Four heroes, twelve Zodiac bosses, four worlds — and the whole thing works with a second player on the same screen. (Official Steam screenshot)

The honest caveat: the early runs are the weakest part. The first couple of hours feel thinner than the game turns out to be, because you have unlocked almost nothing and the choices are not yet choices. If you bounce off it in twenty minutes, you have not really seen it.

The 1.0 launch trailer, from Hibernian Workshop's own channel — this is the developer, not a mirror upload.

LUFTRAUSERS is a twelve-year-old game that still works

LUFTRAUSERS is a score-attack arcade game. You fly a small plane over a sea full of battleships, you shoot things, you die, and a run lasts between thirty seconds and three minutes. The whole game is that loop.

The reason it survived the decade is the customisation. You assemble your plane from three slots — weapon, body, propulsion — for more than 125 combinations in total, and each one changes both how the thing handles and how the soundtrack is arranged. Some configurations are deliberately awkward. A laser that overheats bolted to a hull that will not turn produces a completely different game from a shotgun on a nimble frame, and unlocking the next combination is what the hundred-plus missions are for.

The sepia palette is the whole art direction, and it is why the game has not dated the way its contemporaries have. (Official Steam screenshot)

It is not a game you will put sixty hours into. It is a game you will put twenty minutes into, forty times, over several years. That is a perfectly good thing for a free claim to be.

The 2013 Warfront trailer. Note this is a mirror upload on the Indie Game HQ channel, not Vlambeer's or Devolver's own.

What a free claim actually costs you

Nothing, in money. There are three real costs worth naming.

• An account with 2FA. Epic requires two-factor authentication on the account before it will hand over free games. Set it up once and it stops being a problem.
• A second launcher. The games live in the Epic client, not Steam, and they do not migrate. For a lot of people that is the deciding factor.
• Attention. The largest hidden cost of weekly giveaways is a library of 300 claimed games you will never open, which quietly makes it harder to decide what to play.

Against that: a claimed game is yours permanently, not a rental that expires when a subscription lapses. That is the meaningful difference between this and a catalogue service, and we went through the wider mechanics of it in our guide to getting free PC games legally every week. If you are weighing the Epic client against the alternatives more generally, our store comparison covers what each one is actually good at.

Next week: Mindcop and Shogun Showdown

Epic has already published what replaces these two on 17 September, and the upcoming pair is arguably stronger than the current one.

Mindcop is a hand-drawn detective game from solo developer Andre Gareis, released in November 2024. It has a small review count — a few hundred — but a Metacritic of 87 and 94% positive on Steam, and it does something most detective games flinch at: the investigation runs on a clock, and you can run out of it.

Mindcop's whole look is hand-drawn, and the time limit is the mechanic rather than a difficulty setting. (Official Steam screenshot)

Shogun Showdown is a turn-based tactical roguelike from Roboatino, 95% positive across 7,000 reviews and running even higher — 97% — on recent ones, which is unusual for a game a year past release.

Shogun Showdown plays out on one lane, which makes every turn a positioning problem rather than a damage calculation. (Official Steam screenshot)

Worth knowing now, because it changes nothing about this week — claim both this week's games anyway — but it does mean that if you were going to buy either of next week's on a whim, wait seven days.

The bottom line

Claim both. They cost a click each and the claim is permanent.

Then install Astral Ascent and give it three hours rather than twenty minutes, because the game does not show its hand early. Install LUFTRAUSERS too — it is small enough that the decision is not really a decision — and treat it as a thing you open when you have a spare ten minutes, not a thing you sit down to.

If neither lands, that is fine: nothing was spent. If you want to go further into the genre Astral Ascent belongs to, and you are willing to pay for it, our roguelike round-up is the next stop. And if you would rather keep waiting for the giveaways, the last one we covered is still a better narrative game than most things you will pay for.