Score
0
Best
-
An enemy fleet hangs in formation overhead. One by one, ships peel off and dive at you — read the arcs, dodge sideways, and pick them off before they swarm.
Your ship sits at the bottom of the screen. Touch or drag anywhere on the playfield and the ship follows your finger left and right. Nothing moves until your first touch. From then on the cannon fires upward automatically as soon as the previous shot hits or leaves the screen — there's nothing to tap for shots.
Above you, a grid of enemy ships sits in a slow side-to-side formation. Every couple of seconds one of them leaves its slot and dives at you along a curved path that aims for where you were when it broke off. Each diver fires one bullet straight down at the midpoint of their dive.
Touching a diving ship or any bullet costs a life. You have three.
Hits on formation ships score 50 points. Catching a diver in mid-arc is harder, so it pays double at 100. Clear every ship on screen for a 500-point bonus and the next level. Each level sends divers more often and makes them faster, with no upper limit — from level 12 on, enemy bullets speed up too — so every run eventually ends.
Stay moving. The dive curve is computed the moment a ship breaks off, so it aims at where you were a heartbeat ago — keep drifting and the arc lands behind you. Stop to take aim and you stop directly under the target reticle.
Shoot the divers, not the formation. The grid above is patient; it'll wait for you. The diving ship is the only one that can reach you this second, and it's worth double on top of that. Train your fire on whichever ship just left its slot.
Don't camp the corners. A diver aims at where you were, then swings sideways by a random amount of up to about a sixth of the screen, so you never know in advance which way to step. Flush against a wall you can only dodge one way; the middle two-thirds of the screen gives you escape room in both directions, which is what you actually need when two ships dive at once.
The formation drifts side to side, so the column lined up over you keeps changing. When that column thins out from your own fire, the divers from that column have nowhere to hide on the way down — that's your kill streak window. Push your shots into whichever column is currently above you and let the formation feed targets into your stream.