Insect Swarm Millions of Bugs, One Gunship

You pilot a small gunship over a desert world, moving in any direction while your weapons fire where you aim. The insects come in dense, fast-moving waves, and the game is built around carving through them: circle around a horde, fire your rockets into the thickest part of it, and watch crystals spray out. The tutorial takes about a minute, and after that the loop is simple. Kill bugs, collect blood crystals, return to base, get stronger, go back out. There is no story to sit through and no menu to learn. It is a game that knows what it is for, and it starts delivering almost immediately.

Every upgrade in the game has no level cap, so as long as you keep hauling crystals home, the numbers keep climbing: armor, damage, speed, cargo capacity, energy shields. Twenty-odd upgrade and weapon options give each stage of the run a different feel. After your first swarm lord falls, you unlock the mech: a towering frame you can switch into at will, armed with a melee weapon with extended reach and a heavy Gatling gun, and upgradeable in its own right. One swing of that blade clears a wide swath of bugs at once, and it is the most satisfying thing in the game.