Radius Raid is a top-down space shooter played in an arena larger than your screen. The keyboard flies your ship while the mouse aims the gun, so you can retreat in one direction and fire in another. Each level adds a new enemy with its own way of hunting you, and Radius Raid unblocked runs right in your browser with nothing to install. Jack Rugile made it for a 2013 game jam that capped entries at 13 kilobytes, which is why every shape and sound effect is generated by code.
Your First Round
Click PLAY on the menu. Your ship sits in the middle of a dark grid. Move with W A S D or the arrow keys, and the ship turns to face the mouse pointer wherever it is. Hold the left button to fire. If holding the button gets tiring, press F to switch on autofire, which keeps shooting at the pointer until you press F again.
The first enemies slide in straight lines from the edges. They are worth 5 points each and pop in a single hit. Your ship has no lives. Instead, a Health bar drains while any enemy is touching you, and a full bar lasts only about two seconds of contact. When it is empty, the round ends and a summary shows your score, level, kills, shots fired, power-ups collected and time alive.
Radius Raid Enemies and Levels
The arena is twice as wide and twice as tall as the view, and a mini-map in the bottom left corner shows enemies that are off screen. As your Progress bar fills, the level rises and a new type joins the mix. All 13 types, in order of arrival, include:
- Straight-line drifters and diagonal drifters, the easy 5 and 10 point targets.
- Chasers that steer straight at you.
- Splitters that break into small, fast pieces when destroyed.
- Wanderers that move at random speeds.
- Stealth ships that are faint and easy to lose against the background.
- A slow, heavy brute that soaks up eight hits.
- Small speedsters that die in one hit but close the gap fast.
- Growers that swell in size and flash colors once they get close to you.
- Circlers that orbit you and tighten the loop.
- Spawners that keep releasing quick chasers.
- Towers that appear in random spots and take ten hits.
- Zippers that shoot across the arena in random directions without homing, worth 65 points.
Point values climb in steps of 5 with each new type, from 5 for the first drifters up to 65 for zippers. The small pieces from a splitter are worth 5 each, and the chasers a spawner releases are worth 30, so a spawner you leave alive briefly can actually pad your score if you can handle the pressure.
After level 13 no new types arrive. Instead, each further level gives every enemy extra toughness, so shots that used to be enough stop being enough.
Power-Ups and What They Do
Each kill has about a one in ten chance of dropping a power-up. There are five:
- Health Pack slowly refills part of your Health bar. It only drops once you have lost some health.
- Slow Enemies cuts every enemy’s speed to a third.
- Fast Shot more than doubles your fire rate and makes bullets fly faster.
- Triple Shot fires three bullets in a spread.
- Pierce Shot sends bullets through targets instead of stopping at the first one.
Several can run at once, and stacking Triple with Pierce is the best crowd-clearing combo in the game.
Strategy That Keeps You Alive
- Keep drifting. The ship glides and slows gradually, so steady movement is safer than stop-and-go.
- Watch the mini-map, not just the screen. Turn your aim toward a group before it reaches the edge of the view.
- Kill spawners first. Every second one survives adds more chasers to deal with.
- Pop splitters from far away. That gives you room for the pieces that fly out.
- Use walls carefully. The edge of the arena stops you, and getting pinned there with a crowd behind you is the fastest way to lose health.
- Grab power-ups quickly. They are dropped where enemies die, which is usually right where you were aiming.
Mistakes That End Runs Early
New players often stand still and spin the aim around, which works for two levels and then fails badly once chasers and speedsters arrive. Another trap is chasing a far-off power-up through a crowd, losing more health on the way than it gives back. Finally, stealth ships are easy to forget. If your health drops and you see nothing nearby, one is probably resting against your ship.
Playing at School or Home
Radius Raid needs a keyboard and a pointer, so it suits Chromebooks, laptops and desktops rather than phones. The game screen scales to fit the window. Press M to mute the sound effects, and P to pause between classes. A single round can last two minutes or twenty, depending on how far you get.
If you like shooters, Astroblast has you breaking up drifting space rocks with a coasting ship, and Andromeda Invaders fires for you while you dodge. Tank Combat moves the action to the ground with bouncing shots. Browse the rest on the action games page.
