Spry Fox's Steambirds Alliance goes live tomorrow. I've been mucking around in the beta for nearly a year, and truth be told, I was NOT sold that long ago, nor even a few months ago when I went back to see what had progressed. But now... now it's getting somewhere.
bullet hell shooter: pick from a variety of flying ship classes; each comes with a default attack, buff, and "escape" maneuver. then enter a massive top-down bullet-hell universe...
MMO: ...where dungeons will appear on the fly after larger waves of rogue enemy ships are cleared out. you can also follow mission paths with arrows pointing you to a chained series of objectives.
permadeath: it takes 1.5 hours as a newbie, and 45 mins as a pro, to max a character out to level 20, so when one of your ships inevitably dies, it's not an end-of-the-world heartbreak to start from scratch. every permadeath sees certain universal stats crawl up.
shared shooter: you can't sell or deconstruct lesser loot. instead, you're expected to drop any extra cargo you have so that other nearby players can snag it if they're starting from scratch. all quests and grouping are designed for shared play, so you're never competing with nearby players for loot, and shared experience points are as simple as fighting alongside anybody you see. you can aim your reticule and see other players on a map, then warp to them with a 3-second delay to help them with whatever quest or open-world combat they're in.
f2p: every cash purchase is either for cosmetics or to unlock QoL boosts (more character slots) or specific quests. (I need to play more to understand how the paid quest content works, but I honestly think that's a fair thing to gate behind real money, since you're not paying for abilities or damage boosts.) every purchase I've seen is the kind that you can't lose if a character suffers permadeath.
If all of this sounds familiar, that's because the core design team made Realm of the Mad God before they abandoned that project in favor of this one. (RotMG is still hosted/maintained by another company, not its creators.) right now, Steambirds Alliance is really fun at first blush, and easy to group up with friends. (though if anyone dies mid-mission, that's a permadeath end, and the rest of your group will either need to hang around and survive while the dead person rolls a new ship and rushes your way, or everyone needs to tap a single "return to the home city" button to regroup.)