Rail shooter · endless plain · about two to four minutes a run
Sky Strike
The plain does not end and neither does the traffic. Wireframe fighters grow out of the horizon, the pylons come up out of the ground, and the only thing you own is where you are standing when they arrive.
Sky Strike
You fly forward and you never stop. Shoot what comes out of the horizon, get out of the way of what comes out of the ground, and stay alive through as many waves as the plain will give you.
- Move the mouse, or WASD / arrows
- Space or click to fire, hold to keep firing
- P or Esc pause
- R restart
Three lives. Everything out there spends them: the fliers lean toward a point just beside your hull and turn too slowly to correct it, the pylons are bolted where they stand. Keep moving and neither one finds you — hold still and both of them do.
Paused
The camera has stopped. The plain has not.
Shot down
0Best 0 · Wave 1
Fly high over the pylons or shoot them out of the plain. Both work. Standing still does not.
- Mouse flies the ship
- WASD or arrows fly it too
- Space fires, hold it
- Click the screen to fire
- P pause
- R restart
One division is the entire game
There is no 3D in Sky Strike and there is no engine behind it. Every point in the world is turned into a point on the screen with a single division: divide its offset from the camera by its distance, multiply by one constant, and add the middle of the screen. That is the whole renderer. Everything that makes it feel like a place — the plain rushing under you, a pylon swelling from a scratch on the horizon into something you have to steer around — falls out of that division, because the number underneath it keeps getting smaller.
The camera itself never turns and never slows. It only ever advances, and it advances faster with every wave. Nothing in this game moves toward you; you are moving toward it, which is why a pylon can be a distant mark on the horizon one second and a wall in front of you a few seconds later, with no visible journey in between.
Everything in the sky is trying to be where you are
Traffic arrives in two kinds and both of them will end your run. The fliers — drones, weavers, and the three-hit sentinels that break into two more drones when they come apart — do not come straight at you. The instant one appears it picks a point slightly off your hull, and spends the rest of its life turning toward that point at a fixed, unhurried rate. It is committing to where you were when it spawned, and it can never turn fast enough to make up the difference.
That single rule is the whole of the game's fairness. Turn a flier loose on your present position and it is not a threat you can answer, only a coin toss; give it a turn slow enough and it becomes a thing you beat by moving. The geometry is simply this: a pursuer turning at a fixed rate trails its target by a gap set by the target's speed, so a ship flying flat out opens a distance that closes only if it slows down. The fliers are not dodged so much as outrun. A hard sideways move puts you a body's width off the line they committed to, and they slide past it.
The pylons do not steer, which is the whole problem
The pylons are bolted to the plain. They do not track anything, they do not change their minds, and they arrive in clusters with one gap in them that is exactly as wide as your nerve. You have two honest answers: climb over the tall ones, which means giving up the low ground you dodge the next cluster from, and put a bolt through the cross-brace, which means holding a straight line while everything else in the sky is diving at a place you have already left.
That is the trade the plain keeps asking you to make. Flying is dodging; standing still is aiming; and every wave moves the moment when you have to pick one a little closer to the moment you have to pick the other.