Nova Strike

Endless waves. Glowing plasma. One small ship against the storm.

SCORE 0 ▲▲▲ WAVE 1 BEST 0

NOVA STRIKE

Your cannons never stop — you just fly. Dodge the plasma, break the waves, grab every power-up, and keep the kill chain alive for big multipliers.

Drag on touch screens · mouse or WASD / arrows on desktop

Tip: kills within 2 seconds of each other build your combo — the multiplier climbs to ×5.

How to play

Nova Strike is a classic arcade space shooter rebuilt for the browser. Your ship fires by itself — all your attention goes into flying: weave through enemy plasma, line up your shots, and survive wave after wave as the storm gets denser.

  • Phone / tablet: touch and drag anywhere on the play field — the ship rides above your finger so your hand never covers the action.
  • Desktop: steer with the mouse, or use WASD / arrow keys. Press P to pause.
  • You can't hold fire — the cannons are always hot. Position is your weapon.

Know your enemies

  • Darts — small, fast, and dumb. They dive straight at where you were standing.
  • Weavers — slide down in S-curves and fire aimed shots. Never stand still under one.
  • Splitters — break apart into two darts when destroyed. Pop them early, at a distance.
  • Tanks — slow, armored, and angry: they spit three-way plasma fans. Highest power-up drop rate in the game.
  • The Dreadnought — every fifth wave a boss arrives with a health bar, bullet fans, and reinforcements. It gets meaner each time it comes back.

Power-ups

  • S — Spread: three cannons instead of one for ten seconds.
  • R — Rapid: double fire rate for eight seconds. Stacks beautifully with Spread.
  • H — Shield: an energy ring that absorbs one hit. You keep it until something spends it.
  • B — Nova Bomb: detonates on pickup — wipes every enemy shot off the screen and slams everything alive.

Scoring & combo chains

Every kill is worth points — darts the least, bosses the most. The real scores come from the chain: keep destroying enemies within two seconds of each other and your multiplier climbs — ×2, ×3, up to ×5. Let the chain drop and it resets. A bomb picked up mid-swarm is the fastest ×5 you'll ever see.

Your best score is saved on your device (nowhere else — see our privacy policy), so you always have a number to beat.

About this game

Nova Strike is the fourth cabinet in our arcade, joining Sky Runner, Neon Breaker and Tile Fuse. Like everything we build, it's handwritten vanilla JavaScript on a single canvas — the glow, the particles, the explosions and even the sound effects are generated in code. No game engine, no framework, no tracking scripts, nothing to download.

We're Webmaster & More, a small web studio in Los Angeles. The arcade is our playground and our portfolio: if a three-person team can ship fast, polished software for fun, imagine what we ship for clients. Read the build notes on the dev log.