Spire Assault

A free retro run-and-gun that runs in your browser

Spire Assault is a twenty-stage run-and-gun: you run right, you shoot everything, and the ground keeps trying to get rid of you. It plays in the browser with nothing to install, no account and no payment, on a keyboard at a desk or with on-screen controls on a phone or tablet.

How to play

• Keyboard — A and D move, Space jumps, S crouches, W aims high, J shoots, K kicks, L throws a bomb.
• Touch — a movement pad on the left, fire and jump under the right thumb. Hold up and forward to shoot diagonally.
• Down and Space drops through a platform. F fills the screen, Esc pauses, M mutes.

What is in it

• Twenty stages, each about seven thousand pixels long, from the burning outskirts to the Spire.
• Twenty bosses, one for each stage — a walking siege gun, an armoured train, a dredger on a tidal flat, a thing that hangs over the floor of its own hall.
• Terrain that fights back: acid pools, conveyor belts, low gravity on a lunar quarry, and stretches where the camera runs on without you.
• Weapons that fuse: pick up two different specials and they become a third, stronger one for twelve seconds.
• Soldiers make good shields: knock one off balance, grab it, let it soak up the fire — then throw it.
• Take their bikes: shoot a biker off his machine and ride it, gun on the front.
• Checkpoints through every stage, a score you can beat, and a record kept per stage.

Feedback

Played it? Tell us what you thought — where you got stuck, what you enjoyed, what broke. Leave feedback — a one-minute form, no sign-in.

About

Everything here is original: the code, the twenty levels, the pixel art and the music, which is synthesised in the browser rather than streamed. The game is built with Phaser 3 and TypeScript; third-party notices are in licenses.txt.

Progress is kept in this browser only, so clearing site data or switching browsers starts the campaign over.