Asteroids — the free browser version of the vector arcade classic

Rocks tumble across the field, wrap around every edge and come back at you from the other side. So does your ship, and so do your bullets. There is no fire button: the guns run on a fixed cadence, so the whole game is where you point and when you commit to thrust. On a phone that means one thumb — the nose of the ship tracks your finger, and holding down pushes you the way you are looking.

Every rock you hit gets smaller, faster and worth more. A large one splits into two mediums, each medium into two smalls, and a small finally shatters into nothing. Clear the field and the next wave arrives with one more rock and a little more speed. Three lives, no continues, free and instant with nothing to install.

How to play

• Point at where you want the nose to face — touch or move the cursor — and hold down to thrust in that direction.
• On a keyboard: ← → or A D to turn, ↑ or W to thrust, Space for an extra shot on demand.
• The guns fire automatically. Aiming is steering.
• Large rock 20 points, medium 50, small 100. Breaking one large rock all the way down is worth 520.
• Three lives. Touching any rock costs one; you reappear in the middle, blinking and briefly invulnerable.

Why momentum, not aim, is what actually kills you

Asteroids is one of the few arcade games with no friction worth the name and no brake at all. Every tap of thrust is permanent until you cancel it with an equal and opposite tap, which means speed here is not something you spend — it is something you accumulate. New players discover this the wrong way round: they hold thrust to chase a rock across the screen, arrive going far too fast to stop, and fly straight into the two fragments they just created. The rock did not kill them. The velocity they were still carrying from ten seconds earlier did.

The technique that survives is almost the opposite instinct: stay near the middle and shoot outward. From the centre of the field every direction is roughly the same distance away, so no rock can arrive without you having a moment to see it, and the wrap-around works for you instead of against you — a bullet that leaves the top edge comes back in at the bottom and can still hit something. Chase a rock towards a corner and you give up both advantages at once: half your escape routes are now on the far side of the screen, and the rocks you are not looking at wrap in behind you.

So use thrust in short taps, and treat every tap as a debt you will have to pay back. If you are drifting, a quick burst pointed opposite to your motion is a brake — that is the only brake there is. If a fragment is bearing down and you cannot turn in time, thrusting through the gap beside it is usually safer than trying to stop, because stopping takes exactly as long as starting did. And bear in mind what the scoring is really asking of you: leaving small rocks alive keeps the field crowded with the fastest, hardest-to-see objects in the game, and the wave will not end until they are gone. The safe-looking play of picking off large rocks and ignoring the debris is both the slowest way to score and the most likely way to die.

More games

More things in space to shoot: Space Shooter, Brick Breaker, or outrun the desert in Dino Run. Or browse all games.