I want to be upfront: I went into Australia Did It expecting to enjoy it. What I did not expect was to come out of the demo feeling like I’d just witnessed someone quietly dismantle the architecture of genre convention and build something new from the rubble. Rami Ismail — Dutch-Egyptian developer, industry ambassador, and the mind behind Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers, and Ridiculous Fishing — has spent years advocating for creative risk-taking in the games industry. With Australia Did It, he doesn’t just talk the talk. He bets on it. Hard. And based on everything I’ve seen and played through the available demo, the bet looks like it’s paying off.
A bold, thrilling experiment that earns the word “new.”
The Setup: Blame It on Australia
Before we even get to the mechanics, I have to acknowledge the premise, because it is one of the most absurd and quietly brilliant conceits I’ve encountered in recent memory. Decades ago, a catastrophic mystery event evaporated the entire Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind a vast hostile wasteland crawling with oversized insects, reanimated ancient war machines, and all manner of grotesque mutated creatures. Nobody knows what caused it. The title makes the accusation: Australia Did It.
It’s a joke that lands precisely because it sidesteps the usual lazy shorthand — Ismail has spoken openly about not wanting to pin environmental or geopolitical catastrophe on the usual suspect nations — and because Australia is, by just about every metric, powerful enough and remote enough that such a thing wouldn’t really affect them. It’s absurd, self-aware, and genuinely funny. More importantly, it immediately tells you what kind of game this is: one that isn’t taking itself too seriously while being extremely serious about its ideas.
You play as a mercenary team hired to escort cargo trains across the dried-out seabed of what was once the Atlantic Ocean. The mission is deceptively simple — deliver the goods, defend the train, survive long enough to keep moving. The company motto, delivered with pitch-perfect deadpan: cargo delivery is mandatory, repairs are optional. This framing isn’t just flavor. It sets the tone, the stakes, and crucially, the design philosophy. Nothing here is precious. Nothing is meant to be pampered. You’re supposed to break things, lose units, and keep going anyway.
Two Modes, One Cohesive Vision
Australia Did It splits its gameplay into two fundamentally different phases, and the genius of the game is how seamlessly these two distinct experiences reinforce each other rather than feeling like oil and water.
The first is Station Mode, the turn-based tower defense leg of the experience. Before each departure, you place your mercenary units on a square-shaped conveyor belt that wraps around your parked train. Enemies approach from any side of the grid, and you have a limited number of turns before you absolutely must board and depart — because if you overstay your welcome, the enemy waves scale aggressively and will overwhelm you without mercy. This is an important and elegant design decision: there is no beating Station Mode. You’re not trying to wipe out every enemy. You’re surviving until departure becomes more strategically sound than staying. The design asks you to know when to cut your losses, which is a refreshingly mature ask.
What keeps Station Mode from feeling like a standard tower defense is the conveyor belt itself. You can rotate it during your turn, repositioning your entire unit lineup to redirect fire, protect flanks, or align for a critical shot. Deciding when to rotate, by how much, which unit should absorb which incoming attack — it produces the kind of decision density that would feel overwhelming in real-time. The fact that it’s turn-based is not just a convenience; it’s load-bearing to the experience. The action is condensed and weighty. Each turn carries consequence. It’s reminiscent of chess in its demand for foresight, but with the tactical pressure of a game that actively wants to overwhelm you.
The second phase is Journey Mode, and this is where Australia Did It earns the “reverse bullet hell” half of its self-coined genre label. Once the train departs, the camera pulls back to a top-down on-rails perspective, and the game undergoes a tonal and mechanical transformation. Now, instead of carefully positioning units against waves, you’re deploying those same units as weapons, firing them at the swarms of creatures flooding toward your moving train. You become the bullet hell. You are the source of the chaos, the player who rains projectiles on thousands of swarming enemies in real-time, creating the kind of sensory overload that the bullet hell genre is famous for — only you’re on the delivering end rather than the dodging end.
The damage you sustain during Journey Mode carries forward into the next Station, creating a persistent risk-reward loop across the length of a run. Overextend in station combat and you might be structurally compromised before the train even starts moving. Fail to clear the journey efficiently and you arrive at the next station already bleeding. It’s an interconnected tension system that gives both halves of the game genuine stakes.
The Merge System: Depth Without Complexity for Its Own Sake
If Station Mode and Journey Mode are the skeleton of Australia Did It, the unit merge system is its beating heart. And it is, I think, the single most exciting design idea in the game.
Units begin their lives as straightforward archetypes — a Nomad, a Gunslinger, a basic attacker with a defined role. Level them up, and two units can be fused together to create something entirely new. A Nomad and a Gunslinger become a Rocketeer. Keep merging surviving veterans and you unlock stranger, more specialized, more powerful configurations. There are over thirty unit types and more than 1,500 possible combinations — not as a boast, but as a practical reality that encourages relentless experimentation. Want to merge poison-damage output with a gunslinger to create a status-spreading brawler? Done. Want a rocket launcher hybrid that also heals adjacent units? That apparently exists, and it sounds exactly as chaotic as it is.
Crucially, Ismail has built in an important constraint: you don’t fully control which units you start with. What’s available shapes what you can make, forcing adaptation rather than optimization. There’s no single dominant build to discover and then repeat into infinity. The fun, as Ismail has described it, is in the unexpected combinations — the wild pairings you might never intentionally plan for that turn out to be devastatingly effective, or spectacularly wrong. The merge system rewards curiosity over mastery, which is a genuinely rare quality in a strategy game.
Layered on top of this is the Reward Card system. After each successful station, you choose from a small selection of cards that grant unique perks and passive boosts, letting you nudge the run’s direction without dictating it entirely. This is where the roguelite-adjacent energy lives — not in the structure (the game isn’t technically a roguelite), but in the way each run can take a different shape. Rami has also spoken about intentional failure design: he wants players to know early in a run whether things are going well or collapsing, so no one is forced to grind through a deteriorating session they already know is unwinnable. That kind of design respect for the player’s time is worth calling out.
A Small Team Making a Big Statement
There’s a broader context to Australia Did It that I think matters when evaluating the game, and it’s worth being direct about it. This project is, in part, a statement. Ismail has been vocal about the games industry’s retreat into safe, predictable design — publishers funding later and later in development, chasing proven templates, filtering out creative risk at the institutional level. He nearly couldn’t find a publisher for Australia Did It. Mystic Forge — a boutique label founded by veterans of Good Shepherd Entertainment, the team behind Monster Train — stepped in and, by all accounts, gave the project genuine creative space.
The result is a game that feels like it was made by people who actually wanted to make it. That might sound like a low bar, but it’s increasingly not. The art style is clean and colorful — top-down pixel work with genuine character, rendered in a post-apocalyptic palette that’s bright enough to be readable during the chaos and moody enough to sell the wasteland atmosphere. The audio design in the demo has real impact, especially during Journey Mode, where the auditory density ramps alongside the visual one. Aesthetician Labs, the Rochester-based worker-owned development cooperative that co-built the game with Ismail, has turned in work that punches above what the small-team footprint might suggest.
System requirements are lightweight — a GTX 1030 and an Intel Core i3 at minimum — which means this isn’t a game hiding behind spectacle to justify itself. The game available in the demo runs clean, with no instability issues across multiple play sessions.
Does It Stick the Landing?
Based on the demo, the core loop is compelling in ways that suggest a finished game with strong long-term replay potential. Station Mode has enough decision-making depth to reward deliberate play, Journey Mode provides cathartic explosive release, and the merge system is the connective tissue that makes each run feel meaningfully different from the last.
There are open questions that only the full release will answer. How much does the experience sustain itself across the full arc of a run — does it deepen, or does it plateau? How many distinct environments does the dried-out Atlantic seabed offer, beyond the desert and jungle glimpses shown in preview materials? How deep is the Reward Card pool, and does it branch enough to support the variety the merge system promises? These aren’t concerns born from skepticism; they’re the natural questions of a game that has set a high bar for itself in its opening hours.
What I can say with confidence, having played the demo and absorbed everything available about Australia Did It’s design: this is the work of someone who knows exactly what he’s making and why. Rami Ismail has built a game that would not exist if the industry’s more conservative tendencies had prevailed. That it exists at all feels like a minor miracle. That it’s also genuinely good — and in places, genuinely exciting — feels like a vindication.
Australia Did It is a shot across the bow of safe, predictable game design — compact, mechanically inventive, and built with real conviction.
A demo that plays like a promise: bold, mechanically cohesive, and brimming with the kind of creative energy the strategy genre has been waiting for. If the full release delivers on what’s already here, Australia Did It could be one of the most interesting strategy games of 2026.
