👾 Space Invaders
← → or A/D to move, Space to shoot — or drag on touch screens and tap to fire.
How to play
Space Invaders is the arcade classic that started the shooter genre: rows of alien invaders march down the screen toward your lone ship at the bottom, and you are the only thing standing between them and the planet. Slide your ship left and right along the defense line and fire upward to pick off the fleet, one alien at a time. The invaders march sideways across the screen, dropping a little lower every time they touch an edge, so the clock is always ticking. They fight back too — random invaders from the bottom of each column fire bolts down at you. The game ends when an invader crosses your defense line, rams your ship, or your three lives run out. Clear the whole fleet to face the next wave, which arrives faster and shoots more aggressively.
Controls
- Keyboard: ← → (or A/D) to slide the ship, Space to fire. Shots are rate-limited, so tap with rhythm rather than mashing.
- Touch / mouse: drag your finger across the playfield to steer the ship — it follows your touch — and tap to fire. Tap-fire has the same rate limit as the spacebar.
- Restart resets the run to wave 1 with a fresh score and three lives.
Tips & strategy
- Thin the columns first. Invaders only shoot from the lowest alien in each column, so clearing a full column removes an entire gun from the fight.
- The outer aliens are the most dangerous — they reach the screen edge first and force the whole fleet to drop sooner. Prioritize the edges when the fleet gets low.
- High-value targets live at the top. The top two rows are worth 30 and 20 points per kill, so sweeping upward through a column pays better than picking off the cheap 10-point front line.
- Keep moving between shots. Enemy bolts are aimed at where you were standing, so a steady side-to-side drift dodges most return fire without any extra effort.
Scoring
Every kill scores by row: 30 points for the top row, 20 for the next two rows, and 10 for the front-line rows. There is no score bonus for remaining lives — survival is the reward — so push deep into later waves where each fleet is worth the full 40 kills. Your running total is shown in the HUD.