NIMRODS: GunCraft Survivor 0.11.7 for macOS

NIMRODS: GunCraft Survivor is a survival roguelite shooter where you piece together your own ridiculous weaponry while hordes of aliens try to stop you.

You're dropped onto a hostile planet as a disposable clone with one job: test experimental guns until you die. Weapon parts rain down in airdrops as you fight. You'll snap together barrels, stocks, and firing mechanisms on the fly — every run ends with a gun nobody else has ever fired. When the aliens finally overwhelm you, the lab scoops up what's left, tweaks your DNA, and sends out the next clone with a few improvements. Your previous weapon builds aren't gone, either. The lab straps them onto autonomous drones that follow your new clone around, providing backup firepower from the moment you land.

Minute to minute, it's pure chaos. You're constantly moving, collecting parts, and reshaping your gun mid-battle. One moment you're spraying electric bolts; two airdrops later you've bolted on a flamethrower attachment and a stock that fires homing missiles. The aliens get meaner the longer you survive, and the ground gets littered with power-ups. Every decision about which part to grab and where to slot it matters — a bad build won't last thirty seconds. The loop is tight: land, scavenge, build, die, upgrade, repeat.

Clone-respawn fans and gun tinkerers

Roguelite veterans who actually enjoy starting over will feel right at home. If you’ve put hours into games where death is a progress mechanic, the clone-respawn loop here makes perfect sense. Tinkerers get the biggest kick out of it — the weapon crafting isn’t window dressing, it’s the whole point. You’re constantly swapping parts and discovering combos the developer probably never expected. Players who like action games but don’t want to commit to a 40-hour campaign will appreciate that a solid run fits into a lunch break. The drones carrying your previous builds also mean the game rewards stubborn players who keep losing with the same loadout; eventually your own backup arrives to help. If you bounce off shooters that demand pixel-perfect aim, the spray-and-pray nature of a gun you built from scrap is forgiving in the right ways.

a run from drop to death

Here’s how a typical session flows once you understand the rhythm. You start as a fresh clone with a basic sidearm and an empty weapon frame. The first thirty seconds are about survival — strafe, shoot the weakest aliens, and grab the first airdrop you see. Inside, you’ll find two or three parts. Snap on a barrel that adds spread damage, ignore the stock for now. By the two-minute mark you’re hunting specific drops while kiting a crowd. You spot a rare firing mechanism that turns your projectiles into bouncing sawblades. You slot it in, and suddenly the room-clearing potential doubles. Around minute eight a boss spawns — you’ve built a ridiculous three-barrel shotgun with ricochet rounds by then, but it chews ammo. Your drone from a previous run drifts in and softens the boss with the flamethrower you built two runs ago. You die at minute eleven. The lab screen shows new DNA upgrades unlocked, and the drone blueprint saves automatically. Next clone drops better.

• Runs on Apple Silicon and Intel 64-bit Macs