New Bullet Hell Roguelite Solar Raiders Aims to Steal the Spotlight in 2025

Blending elements of 3D bullet hells, roguelites, party games, and frenetic shooters, the indie space piracy game Solar Raiders aims to smash-and-grab its way into players’ hearts when it launches in 2025. After its generally well-received inaugural game Blue Fire, Robi Studios learned a lot of lessons they’re carrying forward into Solar Raiders ranging from timelines to polish, but one of the most critical lessons for the studio was studying how players interacted with its game.

Moving into a more social-first gameplay experience, player interactions are more important than ever. As a result, the game’s announcement came with a demo released on Steam that allowed players to raid their way toward the Solar Core a year before the title’s expected 2025 release. Gabriel Rosa, the CEO of Robi Studios, spoke to Game Rant about the new contender for the social-focused game spotlight ahead of Solar Raiders’ announcement. He went on to explain the raids core to the gameplay loop of the social shooter.

How to Steal a Solar Core

A raid, Rosa says, takes about an hour to complete spread across five stages filled with bullet hell-style fights evocative of Nier: Automata bosses. Between those stages, raiders will have a mission map that presents them with options. Players can choose to take the direct route that rewards them with currency or take a mini arena battle that has greater rewards, but risks wiping the party and ending the raid.

Players can then spend the currency they gather from a raid, successful or not, on weapons, cosmetics, emotes, perks and more back on the ship of the space pirate Big Boss, who has kidnapped the raiders to seek the Solar Core for him. The things a player enters a raid with, however, are far from the only tools at their disposal.

So when you start a raid, you’ll start off with, of course, your character and the base gun, which has unlimited ammo, and you’ll very, very quickly collect new equipment; in the next two or three rooms, there’s a really big chance that you’ll already have one or two weapons or skill and a weapon … There’s a lot of variety in weapons, we didn’t just want to have players’ weapons be ordinary guns. So we have melee weapons,
we have just overall weird weapons
, we have funny weapons.

Those weapons pair with perks and skills to create a build, often unique to each raid. Perks act as passive bonuses to various gameplay functions like movement speed or damage rate while skills are strategic, situational abilities that have unique effects on a cooldown. Some abilities include faster fire rate within an area, a vertical laser, and movement techniques.

And there are some fascinating and unexpected builds that come out of this system. Rosa recounted one of the other Robi Studios developers taking a joke weapon – a clap that does negligible damage at point-blank range – and pairing it with a defensive skill and a perk that boosts damage close to enemies in order to create a deadly applause.

I kind of think what happens is, when you start the game, you might lean more into weapons. But when you discover how you can create synergies between skills and perks, you start using those a lot more … There’s also a skill, for example, where you place two ends of an electric beam. And if you’re in a boss key room, and before you activate the boss key challenge, you quickly place it in the correct spot, then it’ll do a lot of heavy lifting once the ambush starts.

Boss key rooms, as alluded to by Rosa, grant access to the final challenge of a stage of the raid by beating a challenge–a close-range encounter with a large group of enemies defending the key. Stages, in classic roguelite style, also feature a perk recycler to turn gathered perks into currency, a shop to upgrade or unlock equipment, a challenge arena for a powerful piece of kit, and, of course, a challenging boss fight.

An Up Close and Personal Smash and Grab

The game uses these ideas to drive players into an aggressive playstyle. By using boss key challenges to force players into a close-quarters fight, the game teaches them how to survive such encounters, and how rewarding they can be. Enemies drop currency when defeated in Solar Raiders, which pushes players even further to focus on close combat in its 3D bullet hell.

Rosa’s own playstyle in the game is the embodiment of the way Robi Studios pushes raiders to think close-range, as though he uses a sniper rifle, he charges into the fray with it, firing it right in the face of the challenges between his raider and the Solar Core. Rosa admits the style is strange, but it’s also exactly in keeping with Solar Raiders’ focus on diving into the bullets swarming the player rather than engaging at a distance that affords more cover and reaction time.

We’ve seen a lot that when we have newcomers to the game, they might start off really slow. But in their second or third run, they start to really understand that they have to push forward during combat, and it gets a lot more entertaining, because you close the distance on enemies … So after the first two or three runs, we’ve seen that pretty much all players start to engage with enemies far more aggressively, even though it has that difficulty.

Much of the game’s design is consciously aimed at promoting this close-range gunplay and melee focus, including skills that provide area of effect boons that can be overlapped by multiple players to create a small area at the center of an enemy swarm that boosts their defenses and damage output.

While the game is focused on encouraging a social multiplayer co-op experience, it’s still able to be played by a solo raider, which was an important goal for Rosa. It did require some balance adjustments, and the game plays a little differently as a singleplayer challenge, but Robi Studios is proud that its demo, which is currently available, isn’t just a multiplayer experience.

Solar Raiders will release in 2025, and has a demo available now on Steam.