Neon Siege

Neon Siege is a free twin-stick arena shooter you play right in your browser. You pilot a cyan dart ship across a walled neon arena under a red storm sky while waves of glowing geometric enemies pour in from the edges, and you have two minutes to survive, shoot and score. It is one of our shooting games: fast, short and built for the precision of a keyboard and a mouse, with nothing to download or install. If you enjoy classic arena shooters and space shooter games with bright neon visuals, this one is made for you: the camera rides above your ship and follows it around the arena, and every kill bursts into a shower of tumbling cubes.

A round plays like this. A beam of light falls on one of the spawn gates along the arena's walls to show where an enemy will arrive, a full second before it does, and arrows on the edge of the screen point at anything coming from outside the camera's view. Magenta diamond chasers home in slowly, orange crystal splitters burst into two fast splitlings when destroyed, yellow gunner cubes keep their distance and lob slow orange fireballs, and red dashers paint a charge line on the floor before they rocket across it. The first fifteen seconds are gentle, then the waves grow denser, and at the 90-second mark a mini-boss called the Warden arrives and fills the middle of the arena with rings of bullets. The wave script is the same on every run, so each attempt is the same fair challenge.

Scoring rewards clean play. Every enemy you destroy drops a score gem that flies to your ship, worth the enemy's points times your multiplier. The multiplier climbs by one for every eight kills without being hit, all the way to ×8, and drops back to ×1 the moment something touches you. Your hull takes three hits; lose them all and the run ends early. Survive to the end and you earn a survival bonus of 1,000 points plus 1,000 for every hull point left. The results card shows your kills, your best multiplier and your accuracy, and a Ranked attempt is replayed on our servers before it counts on the leaderboard.

Neon Siege is Desktop only. Like every twin-stick shooter, it asks you to move and aim at the same time: your left hand steers with W A S D or the arrow keys while your right hand aims with the mouse, holds the button to fire and taps Space or Shift to dash. A touch screen cannot do both precisely without virtual joysticks, which would make it a worse game, so it lives on our PC games page with the other keyboard games. On a phone the page tells you it is made for keyboard and mouse and lets you copy or share the link to open it later on a computer.

The game is easy to start and hard to master. Your ship's hitbox is much smaller than it looks, enemy bullets are slow, you are invulnerable for two and a half seconds after a hit, and during the first thirty seconds the dash recharges almost instantly. Experts chase the ×8 multiplier through the whole run and bring down the Warden for its shower of bonus gems. For more fast games, browse our action games and reaction games, or look back at the arcades in our retro games collection.