Guide
Vapor Raid: which weapon chip to grab, when to spend a Bomb or Hyper, and what clears each of the eight belts
Your ship fires on its own, so the real decisions are where to fly and what to pick up. The five weapons compared, every pickup and how long it lasts, Bomb versus Hyper, the Shield Carrier's weak side, the wingmen you earn on belt 4, and how Endless gets harder.
Vapor Raid is a scrolling shooter in a neon sky. Your ship fires automatically: upward when you hold the device upright, to the right when you turn it sideways. Drag to fly; on a keyboard use the arrow keys or WASD, Space for a Bomb, Shift for Hyper and Esc to pause. You can play it in your browser.
Staying alive
You have 5 hits per run. After each hit you are untouchable for a little over a second. Enemy bullets hurt, and so does flying into an enemy; Kamikaze drones chase you and blow up on contact.
Bomb and Hyper
- Bomb (the B button): you start each run with 3 and can carry up to 5. A Bomb deals heavy damage to every enemy on screen, wipes out every enemy bullet and keeps you safe for a second. Use it when you are boxed in, not to speed up a kill.
- Hyper (the H button): the meter fills by itself in about 25 seconds and every kill adds 6% more. When it reaches 100%, Hyper fires a wide fan of 16 lasers that pass through enemies, with a short moment of safety. It is your best tool against a boss or a dense wave.
Weapon chips
About two out of three destroyed enemies drop something, and every drop disappears after 8 seconds. A weapon chip replaces the gun you have until you pick up another one, so steer around a chip you don't want.
| Weapon | How it fires | Good for | |---|---|---| | Starter gun | Single shots | Nothing special; swap it as soon as you can | | Spread | Three shots in a fan | Swarms and side lanes | | Laser | The fastest fire, each shot goes through 2 more enemies | The highest damage; lines of enemies and bosses | | Homing | Shots turn towards the nearest enemy | Teleporting Elite Prisms; the lowest damage per second | | Heavy | Slow, big shots | Steady damage on one large target |
On paper, the Laser deals more than twice the damage per second of the starter gun, and Homing deals the least, but it never misses.
The other pickups
- Shield: 6 seconds in which nothing can hurt you.
- Magnet: for 8 seconds, pickups drift towards your ship.
- Score multiplier: double points for 10 seconds.
- Bomb: one more Bomb, up to 5.
Enemies worth knowing
- Shield Carrier: takes only about a third of the damage from shots that hit its front. A Bomb ignores the shield, and homing shots that curl round and hit it from behind do full damage.
- Elite Prism: jumps sideways at random. Homing or Spread keeps hitting it.
- Swarm Bits: weak but come in long chains. Spread or Laser clears them.
The Hangar keeps a card for every enemy type you have met; the ones you haven't met show as ???.
The eight belts
Each belt is a fixed timeline: a mini-boss comes around the middle, and the boss arrives 18 seconds before the belt's length is up. The belt is cleared when the boss (and any mini-boss still flying) is destroyed, and that opens the next belt. The Target shown at the top is the score to aim for.
| Belt | Length | Target | |---|---|---| | Dusk Port | 72 s | 800 | | Acid Cirrus | 75 s | 1,200 | | Mirror Fog | 78 s | 1,600 | | Solar Spine | 80 s | 2,100 | | Neon Reef | 82 s | 2,700 | | Storm Needle | 84 s | 3,400 | | Void Harbor | 86 s | 4,200 | | Cult Apex | 90 s | 5,200 |
Clear Solar Spine (belt 4) for the first time and two wingmen join you for good, firing extra shots on both sides of your ship in every run after that.
Endless
Endless mixes every enemy type. The scroll gets faster the longer you last, enemies move faster, waves grow bigger, and from about the 28-second mark a mini-boss shows up roughly every 42 seconds. The Leaderboard screen keeps your ten best runs on this device, marked with the belt number or E for Endless.
More on the Vapor Raid page, or take off now.
