Twin-stick survival · two to four minutes a run
Vector Storm
A fixed arena, a small green ship, and four kinds of thing that want it gone. The waves get heavier on a clock, the drops are worth leaving cover for, and the multiplier only climbs while you are still killing.
Vector Storm
The arena never gets bigger and the waves never stop coming. Kill quickly to hold the multiplier, and cross the map for a drop rather than settling into a corner.
- W A S D move
- Arrows move and fire
- Mouse aim · hold left to fire
- Space fire
- P pause
- R restart
Paused
Nothing is moving. Nothing is getting closer.
Ship down
0Best 0 · Wave 1
Keep moving. Standing still is how the shooters find you.
- W A S D move the ship
- Arrows aim and fire — full keyboard play
- Mouse aim, hold left button to fire
- Space fire in the direction you are facing
- P pause
- R restart
Two sticks, one arena, nowhere to hide
There is no cover in Vector Storm, which is the point: the only defence is distance, and distance is something you have to keep earning. Move with W A S D and shoot with the arrow keys, and you are playing the arcade twin-stick setup exactly as it was designed. Move the mouse and the ship swings round to face the cursor instead, so you can hold the left button and strafe a circle around a crowd rather than backing away from it.
The keyboard path is not a compromise. Because the arrows both steer and fire, a player with no mouse at all can still strafe, kite and cut corners, and the ship always points where the shots are going.
The wave list is the whole difficulty curve
Wave one sends the slow amber chasers, which only ever walk in a straight line at you, and they exist so the arena feels safe for about twenty seconds. Wave two adds the small zig-zag runners, which are fast enough to arrive from an angle you were not watching. Wave three adds the big armoured brutes: they soak most of a clip, and they split into two runners when they finally go, so the honest answer is to kill them at range. Wave four adds the magenta shooters, which back away from you and lob slow red bolts across the arena. After that the composition stops being tidy and the wave number is only a count of how much worse it is getting.
Why the combo punishes caution
Every kill adds to the combo and the combo is what multiplies the score, but it bleeds away a couple of seconds after your last kill. A cautious run that circles the edge picking off stragglers will finish with a small number over a long time. Park in the middle of a wave, let the chasers come to you, and the multiplier climbs into the high single digits where it belongs.