Space Shooter — a free browser arcade shooter, one finger to fly

A formation of aliens marches across the top of the screen, steps down every time it touches a wall, and drops bombs on the way. You fly the ship along the bottom. There is no fire button — the guns run themselves, so the whole game is where you point the ship, which is what makes it work equally well on a phone and a desktop.

Clear a wave and the next one arrives with more rows, more speed and heavier fire. Three lives, no continues, and your score is the wreckage you left behind. Free, instant, and nothing to install.

How to play

• Drag anywhere to fly, or use ← → / A D on a keyboard.
• The guns fire automatically. Aim by moving the ship under what you want dead.
• Each alien is 10 points; clearing a whole wave pays a bonus that grows with the wave number.
• Three lives. A bomb that hits you, or a formation that reaches the bottom, costs one.

Why you should always shoot the outside columns first

Every formation shooter hides the same piece of strategy, and almost nobody finds it by instinct. The aliens bounce off the walls as a single block: the formation reverses when its leftmost or rightmost living member touches a side, and it steps down each time it does. So the width of that block is set by its outermost columns — and the block's width is what decides how quickly it walks into a wall.

Kill the middle first and nothing changes: the block is still as wide as it was, it still turns as often, and it still steps down at the same rate. Kill the outside columns and the block becomes narrower, which means it has further to travel before it touches a wall, which means fewer turns and fewer steps down. Clearing from the edges inwards literally buys you time, and it is the difference between finishing wave six and being crushed by it.

The same logic applies to the bombs. Only the lowest living alien in each column can drop one on you, so emptying a column removes a firing position permanently, while shooting the top of a column removes nothing — the alien below it simply inherits the job. Play the outside columns down to nothing, work inwards, and keep the ship moving between shots: bombs are aimed at where you were, not where you are going.

More games

More things to dodge: Asteroids, Brick Breaker, Dino Run, or Snake. Or browse all games.