Stellar Vanguard is a fast top-down shooter where the run you finish looks nothing like the run you started.

You pick up weapons between waves and level them through combat. At level 5, combine a weapon with the right passive and it evolves into something new — a basic gun becomes a Gatling Cannon, a laser paired with Charges becomes a Capacitor Beam, homing missiles fused with a flak cannon become a Homing Cluster Missile. The build you end up with is rarely the one you planned.

Ten sectors. Five waves each. A boss every fifth wave. The bosses scale with you — if you're coasting, the game notices.

Past wave 50, the difficulty doesn't cap. It keeps climbing. The post-sector-10 survival stretch is designed to kill you eventually, and it will.

WEAPONS AND EVOLUTION

Start with a handful of weapons — rapid-fire guns, piercing lasers, homing missiles, flak cannons, nano swarms, a shrapnel mortar, a kinetic reflector. Level them to 5, then combine with passive abilities to unlock evolved forms. A handful of weapon pairs have their own unique evolution too.

No two runs share the same upgrade sequence, and the shop rerolls mean you're always making tradeoffs.

PASSIVE ABILITIES

Twelve passive upgrades that stack and interact with your weapons: fire rate boosters, adaptive armor, shield regen, XP multipliers, a salvage system that converts overkill damage to credits. Mix them into your build or lean into them for specific evolutions — some passives only matter if you know what you're evolving toward.

CYBERNETICS

Between runs, spend credits on permanent cybernetic implants across three systems:

Cortex (offense) — crit chance, fire rate, extra projectiles
Chassis (defense) — hull, shields, damage reduction
Neural (utility) — XP gain, movement speed, pickup range

Each implant costs Cyber Capacity. You don't have unlimited slots. Choose what kind of pilot you want to be.

SHIPS

Eleven ships, each with a different starting loadout and playstyle. Some you unlock through pilot levels. Some require weapon mastery — actually using a weapon enough to prove you understand it.

HARD MODE

Tougher enemy spawns, higher damage, better credit payouts. The risk/reward is real. Most runs on hard mode don't go well. That's the point.

PLAY OFFLINE

No internet required. Runs save automatically. Three pilot slots by default, expandable to ten. Cloud save syncs across devices if you connect your Google account.

18 achievements — a few of them hidden. You'll figure out which ones.

Made by a solo developer in Godot.