If you’ve ever installed Google Chrome or Ungoogled Chromium from your Linux distribution’s app store, you’ve come across Chromium BSU. And while the game is rather basic, it does nail most fundamentals.

Before you play I implore you to make sure you have hardware acceleration enabled. The game’s target 50FPS will not be hit other wise.

The game is an endless shooter, you move with the mouse and fire your weapons with the Space bar. Enemy waves are smartly composed to take advantage of mouse movement. Triangle formations require you to quickly jerk your mouse back and forth, purple bubble enemies need you to gently glide your mouse in a circular motion, the two boss enemies have you making sudden sharp movements to avoid beams with massive hit boxes etc.

Controls are tight and smooth and mastery will come quickly. The game’s HUD is also immersive and non intrusive. With striped beams on the side of your screen showing your ammo, shields and health. Every time you pick up a power up the corresponding beam will flash, which is useful when just starting out or coming back after a while.

The player must kill every enemy coming at them or they will lose a life for each one that escapes, power ups are plentiful but you only have a limited amount of ammo, and the game will punish you for holding down the space bar. So you’ll need to show some restraint or face brutal but fair punishment. The game throws just enough power ups at you for most waves to take care of them, but it’s still up to you to use them wisely. This simple yet brilliant approach kept me coming back for several hours to try and perfect both my reflexes and ammo management. It’s the clear highlight of the game and nothing else matches it.

There are only two boss enemies In the game and they aren’t very fun to fight, while their tells are fun to figure out the first time, since this is an endless shooter, you’ll encounter them nonstop the more you play on. This lack of enemy variety extends to the regular ships too, as the same 4 ships, 3 of which barely function differently, get old very fast.

There is one enemy that is unique but not to the games benefit, from level 2 onward you will be bombarded by bright purple bubble disc ships that require you to gingerly make a circular motion with your mouse to avoid their fire, the issue is that they are almost always paired with the other 3 types, meaning you’ll be eating attacks nonstop most of the time, they even show up during boss fights to make them artificially harder, which is just eye rolling.

The game also lacks sound effects when enemies take damage, while you do get a nice stock explosion sound with regular mooks that go down quickly, this lack of sound effects makes bosses feel much more bloated then they actually are, and gives them even more of a chore like feeling when fighting them non stop the further you play.

Visually the game is pleasant, you get a solid standard 90s sci-fi look with heavy piping, scuffed metal surfaces on ships, and circuitry heavy UI. The game lacks graphical options, and the resolution caps out at 960p, so jaggies are unfortunately everywhere.

There are only two music tracks and they aren’t very good, track 1 is a generic cyberpunk beat and track two repeats the same 3 chords nonstop during game play. It gets grating fast and since the game lacks damage sound effects anyway, I muted subsequent runs as it made no difference.


Chromium BSU is a decent time waster should you choose to install it from your distro’s app store, but there are far better Foss games out there.


5/10.