Bomber Run: hard, and not unfair

Waves of fighters and bombers coming down to meet you, and a gun that keeps firing. The genre where "difficult" and "cheated you" are easiest to confuse — so the four things that cause that confusion are rules here, and the page will tell you what each one is.

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Play Bomber Run

Insert no coin

Ready when you are

Arrows or WASD to fly, B for a bomb. P pauses. Or just drag.

←→↑↓ or WASD to fly · Space to fire · B for a bomb · P or Esc to pause · drag anywhere on the screen to fly

Hard, and not unfair

Four rules. They are not difficulty settings — they hold in Gentle and in Hard, on wave one and on wave thirty, and each of them is checked by a test that plays whole games and watches every frame.

The hitbox is small, and you can see itYour aircraft is drawn twelve units across and collides on a dot a tenth of that. Every shooter worth playing has done this since the nineties; most of them hid it, which is exactly why they felt arbitrary. Here the dot is on the screen, so you know what you are threading.
Nothing arrives beside or behind youEvery aircraft enters from above the top edge. There is no such thing here as something materialising next to you — a test watches three long games and records the lowest point anything was first seen at.
Every shot can be got out of the way ofA bullet is never created closer to you than it can travel in a quarter of a second. An enemy that has drifted on top of you simply does not fire. That is an invariant rather than an opinion, and the test counts hundreds of shots looking for one that broke it.
A crash costs one barrel, not the gunLosing every power-up when you die is what turns one bad moment into a game you cannot win back. Here a crash drops you one level; in Gentle it costs nothing. You also come back with a moment of grace and a cleared sky, rather than into the bullet that got you.

What is coming down

Three aircraft, each asking something different of you.

What falls out of a wreck

About one aircraft in seven leaves something behind. Fly into it to pick it up.

Your gun, by level

Your best

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Best scores

How to stay alive

Fly low and small. The instinct is to charge up the screen to kill things sooner. Sitting near the bottom gives you the whole height of the field to read what is coming and the most room to move out of its way. Go up only to finish something off.

Watch the wind-up, not the bullet. Every aircraft tells you before it fires. If you are reacting to bullets you are already a quarter of a second late; if you are reacting to the aircraft that is about to fire one, you have as long as you like.

Never sit under a bomber. Bombers drop straight down. That is the one attack in the game you can make impossible rather than merely dodgeable, just by not being in the column.

Spend bombs. People hoard them and die with three in stock. A bomb clears every shot on the screen and hurts everything flying: if you are boxed in, that is the moment it was for. You can carry three, and you will find more.

Small movements. Your hitbox is a dot. Most of what looks like a wall of fire has gaps far bigger than you are, and the way through is a nudge rather than a dash across the field.

Is it the one you remember?

No. This is an original built on the same idea — fly up the screen, shoot what comes down — in the way the other arcade games here are. The aircraft, the waves, the scoring, the drops and the four fairness rules are this project's, the artwork is drawn in code, and nothing is a port, an emulation or a copy of any cabinet's code or assets.

Common questions

Does it work on a phone?

Yes, and it is the better way to play it: drag anywhere on the playfield and the aircraft follows your finger. Auto-fire is on by default so you do not need a second thumb, and the two buttons under the screen handle bombs.

Why does my gun go down when I crash?

Because losing all of it is worse. The classic version of this takes every power-up when you die, which means the life after a bad moment is harder than the one that killed you, and the one after that is harder still. Dropping a single level is a real cost without the spiral. Gentle mode does not charge even that.

What is the little dot on my aircraft?

Your hitbox — the only part of you that bullets touch. It is drawn deliberately. A shooter that hides it is asking you to guess at the rules it is scoring you against.

Is anything saved or sent?

Five best scores, kept in this browser on this device. Nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and there is no leaderboard.