The Kesh have taken the planet Veyra and captured six of our pilots. Fly over fields, desert, ice, jungle and lava to their Citadel. Dive through the gates to the caves below to bring the pilots home. Drag anywhere to fly. Your guns fire by themselves.
6 stages, 6 bosses, 4 weapons.
A new two-minute survival, rescue or boss mission appears at midnight UK time. Everyone starts at Pilot difficulty with the same weapon and flight plan. Daily scores have their own leaderboard. Campaign and practice stage medals reward rescuing the pilot, losing no ships and destroying a complete formation; records are saved on this device separately for each difficulty.
Shoot down the striped freighters to drop a weapon pod. Its colour changes every second and a half. The countdown ring shows the next colour change; the colour locks as you approach. Pick up the same colour as your gun to power it up (up to level 5), or a different colour to switch.
Everything you can collect floats down with its name underneath, in its own colour:
You start with 3. Shoot down a whole squadron of five darters to win another.
Halfway through each stage a yellow-striped gate scrolls past on the ground. Fly over it to dive into the caves. Down there, break open the cage and pick up the captured pilot for a big bonus. Shoot the green crystal caches on the way: each drops a gem worth 1,000 points. At the end of each cave a guardian blocks the way back up: destroy its drill arms and nose gun, then its core, to return to the surface.
Every stage ends with a Kesh boss. Its core is shielded until you've destroyed all the guns round it.
Extra ships at 70,000, 200,000, 400,000, 650,000 and 1,000,000. Ace scores count one and a half times; Cadet scores count half. If you lose your last ship you can continue from the same stage, but your score goes back to 0.