Wiki
Everything the game does, written down. New here? The front page has the download and how to install it, and the how-to covers playing online.
Playing
| Move | W A S D or the arrow keys |
|---|---|
| Drop a charge | Space |
| Pause | Esc |
| Fullscreen | F11 |
Movement is free rather than cell by cell, and it helps you along: while you walk down a lane you are eased onto its centre line, and if a block corner is in your way the game looks for a small sidestep that clears it. Walk into a wall with no gap and you stop, as you should.
Your own fire kills you exactly as readily as it kills a drone. You have three lives in a run.
The board
Pylons
The magenta-framed slabs. Indestructible. They are the maze.
Circuit blocks
The cyan wafers. One blast breaks one, and some of them are hiding something: a bonus, or the portal out.
Drones
Patrol drones wander. Later sectors send hunters, which run a shortest-path search straight at you. They choose a direction only when standing exactly on a cell centre, which is what makes them trappable.
The portal
Hidden under one block. It stays dark while a single drone is alive, and lights up when the last one is down. Step into it to finish the sector.
Bonuses
| Crystal | What it does |
|---|---|
| Extra bomb | One more charge in the rack at a time |
| Blast range | Fire reaches one cell further in every direction |
| Overclock | You move faster |
| Extra life | One more attempt in this run |
Scoring
Every block you destroy is worth points, so reaching the portal with most of the board still standing is a real choice rather than a free win.
| Blocks | 10 each |
|---|---|
| Drones | 200 each |
| Bonuses | 50 each |
| Clearing the sector | 1000, and 750 more if you stripped the board |
| Time | 12 for every second of par you had left |
Par scales with the size of the board, and time only pays on a sector you actually finished. Dying slowly is not an achievement.
The campaign
Eight sectors across Phoenix, chosen from a map of the city rather than a list. A sector is dark until the one before it is cleared, and clearing one brings you back to the map with your time and score on it.
A run carries its lives and score from sector to sector. Running out of lives ends the run; the city remembers what you cleared.
The last sector holds the core. It is the same silhouette as a patrol drone, scaled up and armoured, and it hunts. Three clean blasts put it down, and it gets faster after every one.
Your bomber
Four colours and three pieces of gear: helmet, pack and chest emblem. There are five ready-made looks and a randomiser if you would rather not decide.
Your pilot name is claimed once and is yours. Capitals, digits, hyphen and underscore, twelve characters at most. The game tells you while you are typing whether a name is still free.
An account is only needed to play online. The campaign asks for nothing.
Level editor
Boards from 11x9 up to 41x31, painted by hand or generated. Bury a bonus or the portal inside a block, place the drones, name it and play it.
Every generated board is guaranteed finishable. That is not luck: the pylon maze is laid first and proved fully connected, and only then are destructible blocks scattered, because a route through a block is still a route.
A board needs a start on open floor and exactly one portal before it can be played, and the editor says so if it does not have them.
Multiplayer
Several bombers on one board. Versus, where the last one standing wins, or co-op, where you clear the map together. Find a match in the browser and join it.
How many bombers a board can take depends on its size, because four on a small board is a scrum: two on the smallest, up to eight on the largest.
Matches are run by a server, not by one of the players. It decides what happened, which is why walking into a wall or dropping a bomb you do not have simply does not work.