IRON WING

How to play

IRON WING is a browser shoot-em-up built around the feel of an old vertical arcade cabinet. Hit start and your fighter sits near the bottom of the screen while enemies press down from the top, with two parallax layers of stars scrolling behind them. Firing is automatic, so the keyboard and your fingers only deal with positioning: the ship is drawn larger than the one thing that can actually be hit, a bright dot in the middle of the hull.

Each of the 5 stages has a wave script built from a fixed seed and a boss with a three-segment health bar; spread, focus laser and homing missiles swap at any time, and P pickups lift power from level 1 to level 6. We did not want you memorising bullet tables. Enemy shots are bright, spaced and predictable, because being able to dodge them is the whole point.

Stages

5

Bosses

5

Weapons

3

Power levels

6

Wingmen

2

Bombs

3

Max combo

x8

Starting lives

3

Controls

What this is

IRON WING is a vertical bullet-hell shooter that runs entirely in the browser. The screen scrolls downward, your fighter holds the lower edge, and enemies arrive from the top in organised groups. Firing is automatic, so there is exactly one job left for your keyboard or thumb: slide that small hitbox through the gaps in the curtain of bullets. The ship is drawn with vector paths a good deal larger than the hitbox; the hitbox itself is a bright dot at the centre of the hull with a thin red ring around it. Watch the dot, not the whole silhouette, and judging distances gets much easier.

A run starts with 3 lives. Five stages play back to back, each ending in a boss with a multi-segment health bar. Clearing the game is not about memorising a bullet chart or learning where every shot will be: enemy bullets are drawn with a bright core and a dark outline on a dark field, bullet speeds are kept inside a range you can react to, and every barrage leaves a gap you can pass through. If you want more margin, collect pickups to raise power from level 1 to level 6; a wingman joins at level 4 and a second at level 6, both firing alongside you. Take a hit and power drops one level, which also sends those wingmen away until you climb back up.

There is no download, no account and no permission prompt. Open the page, press Start game, and it plays. All sound, from shot effects to the background figure, is synthesised live by the browser; no audio files are fetched. Scores are written only to this device's local storage, so the game works offline and your best score is still there the next time you open the tab.

Three weapons, six tempers

Press C, or the number keys 1 / 2 / 3, to swap the main weapon at any moment; picking up a colour-matched item switches it too. These are not one stat line with three coats of paint. Trajectory, rhythm and the situations each one suits are all separate, and the firing sounds differ as well: spread is a short square-wave blip, the laser a sharp sawtooth, missiles a low burst of filtered noise.

Spread fires a fan of bullets at once, with more bullets as power rises. It covers a wide area, which makes short work of ranked light fighters, but each shot is weak and thick targets take a while to chew through. The focus laser is a thin, fast piercing beam that travels straight through whatever it meets and counts as a single hit no matter how many enemies it crosses; it is ideal for turrets and bosses lined up on one axis, yet it has no width to spare, so drift a little and you miss entirely. Homing missiles fly slowly, turn after leaving the barrel, and chase the nearest enemy, which suits weaving and diving targets; the trade-off is thin close-range fire and a longer gap between shots.

Power has 6 levels, raised by P pickups. Levels 1 to 3 only change bullet count and damage; level 4 adds one wingman and level 6 adds a second. The pair sit to either side of the hull, follow your movement and each fires a copy of the current weapon. In other words, levels 4 and 6 are two clear steps rather than a smooth curve, and keeping both wingmen on screen is entirely about not getting hit.

• Spread: a wide fan of light shots, good for ranked small craft.
• Focus laser: a thin piercing line built for hard targets on one axis.
• Homing missiles: they turn and chase mobile enemies.
• P pickups raise power; levels 4 and 6 each unlock one wingman.

Five stages and five bosses

The waves in all 5 stages are laid out from a fixed seed, so the same stage opens with the same spawn times, enemy types and formations every single run. Learn a pass once and you can reproduce it. The backdrop changes colour and scenery with each stage: deep space above a low orbit, a sea of cumulus cloud, the tide lines of a drowned coast, the silhouettes of a ruined sector, and finally the airspace around the enemy flagship. Stars scroll in two parallax layers while clouds, wave lines and debris each drift down at their own pace, so the layers never smear together.

There are four kinds of ordinary enemy, each with its own fire. The straight rusher holds a line and occasionally snaps off one aimed shot. The formation weaver arcs left and right and releases three-shot fans in groups. The fixed turret sinks to a set height, stops, and alternates a rotating ring of bullets with aimed bursts. The dive bomber eases down first, then accelerates toward your current horizontal position while dropping a spread below it. The silhouettes and firing styles are distinct enough that you can read which way to step just from the shape coming at you.

Every boss has a health bar split into three segments, and emptying one switches the attack set: ring barrages, aimed volleys, a rotating spiral, and in the later phases a thin warning line followed by a sweeping laser that turns as it fires. Reaching zero health does not make the boss vanish on the spot; a chain of explosions takes the hull apart over a second or so, giving the screen a breath before the interstitial. That interstitial lists the next stage name, lives left, current weapon and bomb count, and grants 1 bomb on entering each new stage, still capped at 3.

• Stage 1 · Departure, low orbit — Sentry "Grey Falcon"
• Stage 2 · Cloud sea, storm deck — Stratus "Cloud-Deck"
• Stage 3 · Tides, sunken coast — Tidebite "Deep Blue"
• Stage 4 · Ruins, Sector Zero — Revenant "Sector Zero"
• Stage 5 · Finale, the flagship — Flagship "Iron Wing"

Combos, bombs and wingmen

Consecutive kills build a combo: down another enemy within two seconds and the chain grows, up to a maximum multiplier of x8. The HUD shows the current multiplier and a small bar for the time left on the chain. Let two seconds pass and it resets to zero, so chasing points and staying alive pull against each other — dipping into a barrage to catch one more small craft can cost a life. Kill count and best combo both appear on the results screen.

Press X for a bomb, spending 1 of them. The screen flashes white, small bullets on the field are cleared, every enemy and the boss take damage at once, and you get a short window of invincibility. You start with 3 bombs and gain 1 at the start of each later stage, capped at 3. Being hit is handled differently: small bullets are cleared, power drops one level, you get brief invincibility, one life is removed, and the run ends when all 3 lives are gone. A bomb is an active tool for attack and survival; a hit is a passive penalty. They never overlap.

The two wingmen are not decoration. Each fires a copy of the current weapon, which makes levels 4 and 6 real jumps in output rather than a cosmetic change. They sit slightly behind and to either side of the hull, ease smoothly toward their formation slots instead of teleporting, and have no separate health of their own. They appear and leave with the power level, which is a quiet way of saying that eating one fewer bullet is worth more than landing one extra shot.

Where your score lives

The results screen lists total score, kills, best combo, accuracy, stage reached, and compares the total against your best score on this machine. Accuracy is bullets fired against bullets that actually connected: a single shot counts as one hit regardless of how many targets it touches, and the piercing laser follows the same rule, so the number never exceeds 100%. The best score is written to browser localStorage under the gs5:tieyi: namespace and stays on this device.

There are no accounts, no server-side database, no cross-device sync and no first-party analytics. Clear the site data and the record starts over. The page does load an ad script to cover running costs, but the game itself neither reads nor uploads any score, and it never asks for microphone, location or similar permissions.

Results give you two exits: Play again restarts from stage 1, and Back to title returns to the title screen with its demo formation. Pause with P or the button outside the canvas, switching to another tab pauses automatically, and R restarts whenever you like. On a phone there is no keyboard: drag anywhere on the canvas to move, with permanent BOMB and WEAPON buttons in the bottom-right corner and auto-fire still on.

Frequently asked questions

A few things that tend to trip people up on a first run, split between controls, numbers and dodging.

How do I dodge on a phone?

Drag anywhere on the canvas. The ship moves by the relative motion of your finger, so you do not have to press on the hull and your hand never covers the hitbox. Firing is automatic, and the BOMB and WEAPON buttons in the bottom-right corner respond to a single tap.

Does power keep falling?

A hit drops it one level, with a floor of level 1, so you never end up with zero fire. P pickups raise it again and the level-4 and level-6 wingmen return with the power level.

Do bombs come back once used?

You gain 1 at the start of each new stage, capped at 3, never above 3. If you want more headroom, spend fewer and save them for the dense phases of a boss.

How do I dodge the end-of-stage laser?

A thin warning line appears before the sweep. Step away from the direction it is turning, and because the hitbox is far smaller than the ship you can pass right along the edge of the beam without moving the whole hull clear.

How to read the bullets

Enemy shots share one visual language: a high-contrast bright disc on a dark field, a pale core picked out in the middle, and a dark outline around the rim, all at a fixed size that never shrinks to fool you. That keeps them legible even over busier backdrops like the cloud sea or the ruined sector. Player fire is deliberately thinner and brighter in the other direction — cyan dots for spread, a pink sliver for the laser, a gold trail for missiles — so the two sides separate at a glance.

Bullet speed is tuned against reaction time, not against a difficulty dial. Ring barrages leave a gap in their spacing, spirals rely on rotation rather than sheer count, and aimed shots lock their direction at the moment of firing instead of curving after you. Being visible, being predictable, being dodgeable: those are the three rules every pattern here follows. The five stages recombine that same grammar rather than suddenly piling on density to catch you out.