ProtoGalaxy gives you and up to three friends a shared fleet, an alien invasion, and a lot of loose objects to fling around. It is a space shooter with online and shared-screen co-op, but its missions also ask you to explore, solve puzzles, and rebuild your ship between fights. One moment your group may be trying to survive a wave of enemy fire; the next, you may be dragging an asteroid or a key across the screen with a gravity beam. The mixture makes ProtoGalaxy an unusual fit for a group that wants more than a straight arcade shooter.
A campaign built from fights, puzzles, and exploration
The story begins with Earth under attack by an alien force. You and your friends fly ships in humanity’s remaining fleet, pushing back the invasion and trying to give survivors a home. The campaign ties its missions to this larger rescue effort, while the actual objectives vary from clearing enemies to navigating an area, finding a route through a structure, or protecting something important. Missions move through settings such as a scrap yard, reactor, factory, fort, derelict ship, and Earth’s defenses. Some maps connect as many as three missions, so one outing can move through a few distinct objectives rather than staying in a single arena. The result moves between open space and enclosed rooms instead of keeping every level on a scrolling firing lane.
Some missions are action first: enemy ships enter the field, incoming shots crowd the screen, and you maneuver while aiming and firing. Other rooms slow the pace down. Switches, keys, doors, barriers, markers, and other objects can turn navigation into a physics problem. The campaign tutorial introduces the ship, weapons, map interface, and gravity tool, but its explanations are brief. The menus and controls take a little patience before the group settles into the mission itself.
The campaign supports multiplayer progression, with optional challenges layered over its main route. You might try to keep Earth’s shield above a threshold, reach a reactor without using a battery, or take a particular route through a derelict. Several campaign challenges can be completed in multiplayer. These goals give your group reasons to revisit a mission, while the story itself follows a straightforward invasion-and-rescue arc rather than branching into a large set of paths.
One ship, many parts
Your craft is built from components rather than selected from a fixed roster of finished ships. As you earn money in missions, you can acquire equipment and change what the ship can do. You can adjust a build around weapons, defenses, movement, and utility, then take it back into a later encounter. The basic cycle is clear: fly into a mission, collect resources and blueprints, survive the objective, and use what you brought back to improve the next outing. Parts affect more than damage: a ship can trade speed, durability, and utility depending on what you install, so your craft changes along with the campaign’s demands.
Combat asks you to manage both movement and aim. Your ship moves through the field while your reticle points toward targets, so turning away from danger does not necessarily mean giving up a shot. Enemies vary in size and durability; larger craft can have shields, hull, and destructible pieces, which makes weapons matter in different ways. You can switch weapons with hotkeys and aim independently from ship movement. Separating movement from firing can feel awkward at first, especially when several enemies are closing in.
Friends who enjoy tinkering with loadouts have room to compare parts and experiment; players hoping to jump from menu to immediate action may find the setup slower than the shooting suggests. Controller support is partial, so keyboard and mouse are the clearest setup to plan around.
The gravity beam turns the scenery into a tool
ProtoGalaxy’s clearest twist is a gravity weapon that can pick up and move objects. You can pull an asteroid toward an enemy, shove a ship into a wall, carry a key toward a lock, or use whatever is nearby to reach a switch. The same device links combat and puzzle solving: a chunk of debris can become cover, a projectile, or the object that completes a room’s mechanism. You can use the beam on asteroids, enemy ships, levers, boxes, and other movable objects.
That interaction changes how a room reads. In a conventional shooter, an asteroid might simply block movement or absorb a shot; here it may be part of the solution. A puzzle can ask you to find which object is movable, line it up with a target, or move it without exposing your ship to enemy fire. In co-op, those systems occupy the same mission space: ships can keep firing while another player uses the beam on a puzzle object, so the shared action can shift between combat and manipulation without changing missions. A key can travel to a lock, a lever can open a route, and a box or asteroid can become a projectile. The game does not require every mission to be solved this way, and some challenges are direct combat or navigation tests. That variation helps the campaign shift rhythm, even though the same ships, weapons, and interface carry across the different rooms.
Success can depend on reading the screen and the controls as much as firing quickly. The beam has a range, and only some objects respond to it. Some campaign challenges put tight limits on the beam: one asks you to finish the Black Hole mission using only it, while another restricts its use in the Factory. The weapon is a real problem-solving option, rather than a decorative power that appears only in a tutorial.
A different pace in Proto Defense
Proto Defense adds an arcade-style turret-defense map. Your group defends Earth against waves of alien attackers, choosing turrets, moving them during a run, and responding when larger enemies appear. Its loop is more fixed than the campaign’s mix of exploration and rooms: threats approach, defenses fire, and the group tries to keep the planet from taking too much damage. You can reposition turrets as the attack develops, and optional challenges reward surviving later rounds, holding cash, selling turrets, or keeping many defenses active.
This mode gives friends another shared objective for a score- and survival-focused session. It is distinct from assembling ship parts for a campaign mission: the central work is placing and adjusting defenses while tracking incoming threats. Proto Defense uses the same editor as custom maps, connecting the add-on to the game’s creation tools as well as its combat systems.
Build another galaxy
The built-in editor lets you create custom maps and missions, share them online, and download other players’ creations. Custom content can add another puzzle room, combat gauntlet, or small scenario, depending on what its creator builds. It gives a curious group another way to play after the campaign, with the editor opening space for challenges designed around friends.
For the campaign itself, progression comes from collecting blueprints and equipment, improving your ship, and moving through missions with higher challenges. Optional restrictions add goals alongside the main route, while progression stays centered on your craft and mission results rather than a deep character-role system. Your friends can all fly ships and contribute firepower or utility; no one has to fill a fixed class.
The atmosphere is colorful and arcade-like, with a top-down view of ships, blocky structures, asteroids, and bright weapon effects set against space backdrops. Its older interface puts many systems on screen at once, and repeated missions can make the campaign feel familiar. ProtoGalaxy is a compact space adventure built around its gravity weapon and co-op ship tinkering, rather than a modern simulation with streamlined controls.
Online and local co-op for up to four
Co-op supports up to four players total, online or through local shared- or split-screen play. The host counts as one of the four. The game is available for Windows.
For online co-op, one player hosts and friends can join after the mission begins; the host screen displays the network port. Remote Play Together is a separate option that streams a local shared-screen session to remote friends.
ProtoGalaxy fits a small group that likes arcade shooting and has room for loadout tinkering and the occasional physics puzzle. You get shared campaign objectives, a gravity tool that turns movable objects into weapons or keys, and a separate turret-defense mode. There is no specialized class setup, but the controls and ship-building screens ask for more attention than a simple twin-stick shooter. If your friends want fast rounds with little setup, the menus may slow the start; if you want a four-player space adventure where a rock can become both puzzle piece and ammunition, the mix of co-op combat and improvised physics gives you plenty to work with.