Last Soldier: Crowd Runner

Your crowd runs forward on its own. Your thumb only moves it sideways. Everything else is one question: where do you send your fire?

Nothing on this bridge is worth anything until you have shot at it.

Your crowd runs forward on its own, at a constant speed, forever. Your thumb only moves it sideways. And the whole game is one question, asked without pause: where do I send my fire?

GATES ARE NOT TRAPS, THEY ARE WORK A gate arrives at zero, or below it. Shoot it and it climbs: +1, +2, +3. Your crowd only fires straight ahead, so the only way to feed a gate is to stand in front of it. A red gate is not something to dodge. It is a building site, and it is the only thing this game has to teach you.

Every gate also hands you a troop: rifleman, bazooka, scout, tank, helicopter, bomber. It announces which one on a card floating above the frame, carrying the real model, turned three-quarters. Because +2 tanks does not compare to +3 riflemen by arithmetic, and a row of gates should not be a sum.

CRATES COME IN PAIRS, SO YOU HAVE TO GIVE ONE UP Weapons are locked in stacks of tyres with the price written on them. Take the same weapon twice and it levels up. Take a different one and the counter drops back to one. They land two at a time, in two different lanes. Your crowd only fires across three metres of front, and two neighbouring lanes are wider than that. So you take one and you lose the other, every time. That is the only long-term decision in the game, and it pulls against your curiosity.

SEVEN WEAPONS THAT DISAGREE WITH EACH OTHER The bazooka and the mortar carry a blast that takes everything the disc covers, damage falling off toward the edge. The laser is the far end of the same axis: three barrels, the fastest rate of fire in the game, a ridiculous damage per shot, and eight bodies threaded on a single line. The worst weapon in the catalogue against one gate. The best one against a column. A heavy weapon also changes the body carrying it. Rockets coming out of an assault rifle was the last thing on this bridge that did not read.

THE HORDES SHOOT BACK Waves arrive without end and run straight at you. An enemy who reaches you takes one runner with him and dies: the trade is always one for one, because your headcount IS your health bar. And they fire back, into a narrow window right in front of your crowd.

Gates, crates and hordes all compete for the same fire, and your fire is finite. The tension comes from that competition alone. It needs no boss, no levels and no finish line.

NO TWO RUNS ARE THE SAME The track is drawn fresh every game, so there is nothing to learn by heart. When your headcount hits zero, that is the end, and your score is the only mark. Your best run and your longest march are both kept.

Portrait, one thumb, no account. Seven languages.