Bullet Hell Space Shooter
Bullet Hell Space Shooter puts you in a small blue ship at the bottom of a starfield while enemy craft pour in from above and fill the screen with glowing shots. Your gun fires straight up, and staying alive means squeezing through the gaps in their fire.
Amelia Clarke made the game with the p5.js library, and every ship is drawn from plain shapes. There is nothing to install, so you can play it in a browser tab on any computer with a keyboard.
How to play Bullet Hell Space Shooter
Click the game once so it picks up your keys. Hold Z to shoot and move with the arrow keys in any of eight directions. Some foes fire single shots, others throw out fans of bullets, and a few send shots that bounce.
The red squares in the bottom panel are your health. Each hit takes one, and red pickups give one back. Lose them all and the current level starts over, with your score set back to where it was when the level began. The green squares are bombs, which erase every bullet on screen. You get two per attempt and one more for each level you finish.
There are six levels, and the second and fourth end with a boss that has a long health bar at the top. Downed enemies sometimes leave pickups: point bonuses, gun upgrades that add a second or third stream of fire, and extra bombs.
Controls
| Action | Keyboard | Mouse | Touch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Move | Arrow keys or W A S D | — | — |
| Shoot | Hold Z or B | — | — |
| Slow motion | X or N | — | — |
| Bomb | C or M | — | — |
| Pause | P | — | — |
| Show hitboxes | H | — | — |
| Low graphics | G | — | — |
Tips
- Never let go of the fire key. Shooting costs nothing, and most normal enemies pop after a couple of hits.
- Hang around the lower middle of the screen. It gives you the most room to slide left or right when a spread comes in.
- Slow motion takes a while to refill, so save it for the moment a fan of bullets is about to close around you.
- Spend a bomb when you are down to your last health square. Losing the level costs far more than the bomb does.
- Press H once to see your real hit area. It is much smaller than the ship drawing, so you can graze closer than you think.
If you like Bullet Hell Space Shooter, try these
Egg Time RewindDodging tight fire with a twist: each death rewinds the clock and your earlier lives come back as ghost ships.
PowerwingUpgrades decide this shooter, where you juggle bouncing capsules into weapons before each wave's boss.
Questions
How long does slow motion last in Bullet Hell Space Shooter?
About two seconds, during which everything moves at well under half speed. The round gauge in the lower right then needs roughly ten seconds to fill up again.
Do I have to replay earlier levels after losing?
No. Running out of health only restarts the level you are on. Your score returns to its value at the start of that level and your bombs reset to two.
The game feels laggy. Can I speed it up?
Press G for low graphics mode. It turns off the particle effects and background stars, which helps on older or slower computers.
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