How to play
NEON SWARM is a twin-stick arena shooter. You fly a small white ship around a glowing grid that ripples under every explosion, while glowing shapes keep pouring in. Your ship fires on its own, so you only steer and aim: W A S D to move and the mouse to aim, or aim with the arrow keys if you would rather stay on the keyboard.
Every enemy you destroy drops green shards. Fly close and they are pulled into your ship, and each one adds 1 to your multiplier. Every kill is worth its points times the multiplier, so a 100-point square shot at x200 is worth 20,000. Shards fade after about four and a half seconds. If you are hit, you lose a life, the screen is cleared without giving you any points and your multiplier drops back to x1.
Space or the right mouse button sets off a bomb, which wipes out every enemy on the screen and still scores them. Esc or P pauses, R restarts and M turns the sound on and off. On a phone, drag on the left half of the screen to move and on the right half to aim. With no thumb on the right half, the ship aims at the nearest enemy by itself, and the BOMB button sits at the bottom in the middle. A gamepad works too: left stick moves, right stick aims, and A or any trigger or bumper bombs.
Tips and strategy
- Shards are the whole game. The multiplier only goes down when you die, so a long life spent collecting shards beats a fast kill count.
- Flashing enemies cannot hurt you yet. New enemies flash for up to a second while they appear, and you can fly straight through them.
- Stay out of the corners. A corner leaves you nowhere to go. Circle the middle of the arena.
- Shoot snakes in the head. A yellow snake's long tail blocks your bullets and kills you if you touch it. Only the head can be shot.
- Leave black holes alone until you are ready. A red black hole does nothing until you shoot it. Then it pulls in you, your bullets, the shards and other enemies. It takes 18 hits, plus 3 more for everything it swallows, and once it has eaten ten things it bursts into fourteen fast sparks. A fat one is worth more points and drops more shards, though.
- Bomb before you are trapped. If enemies are closing in from both sides, bomb then, not after.
What's in it
SURGE is the main mode, behind the big PLAY button. You start with three lives and three bombs, and you get an extra life and an extra bomb at 500,000, 10 million, 100 million and 1 billion points. Enemies arrive the whole time, faster and faster. On top of that, a wave lands six seconds in and then about every 15 seconds, and the gap shrinks to 9 seconds. The first seven waves always come in the same order: Pinwheel Flood, Corner Rush, Dodger Wall, Surrounded, Splitters, Snake Pit and Gravity Wells. From wave 6 on, a second, smaller wave often lands at the same time, and after wave 7 the main wave is picked at random. Most runs last three to five minutes.
Your gun improves as the waves go by: two streams at the start, a triple shot from wave 3, four streams from wave 6 and a five-way fan from wave 10. There are six kinds of enemy. Purple pinwheels drift about, cyan diamonds chase you, green squares chase you and dodge your bullets, and pink splitters break into three fast little pinwheels when shot. Then come the snakes and the black holes. Squares join from 20 seconds in, splitters from 35, snakes from 50 and black holes from 70.
BLITZ lasts exactly three minutes, with unlimited lives and no bombs. Each death costs your multiplier and about a second and a half, so it is a pure race for points.
Questions
How do I get a big score?
Keep your multiplier alive. Collect every shard you safely can, and bomb rather than die.
Can I play on a phone?
Yes, held upright or sideways. One thumb is enough, because the ship aims by itself.
Does it save?
Yes, in your own browser: your best score in each mode, your best multiplier and wave, your runs and kills, and whether the sound is on. Clearing your browser's site data clears the save.