Charge Skill
The cyan bar under your ship. It fills as you kill, blinks fast when it is full, and turns into whichever of five buffs you have equipped for that ship.
Filling the meter
The meter caps at 100 and fills only from your own actions. Kills are worth different amounts by enemy size:
A run begins with the charge meter already full, so you can spend it in the first few seconds without waiting — and the first time it happens, an in-game hint points at your ship to tell you to tap it.
| Source | Charge | Which |
|---|---|---|
| Small kill | +2 | Scooter, Blinky, Itsy |
| Medium kill | +5 | Chompy, Mama Spider, Lash, Goldie, Wizzle |
| Large kill | +20 | Any boss |
| Rhythm streak | +10 | Every 10 consecutive correct beats |
| Projectile intercept | +1 | Per hit landed on an enemy bullet, a Spike King spike or a Blaze flame ball — a 10-hit flame ball can feed up to +10 |
The intercept charge exists precisely so a lone-boss fight — wave 100, say — still fills your meter. There are no mobs to kill, but there are plenty of boss projectiles to shoot down.
Spending it
- When it fills, a sound plays once and the bar blinks fast. Click your own ship to spend it. The clickable square is exactly the corner-bracket frame shown when you hover — 66 px, matching the bar width.
- A click while the meter is not full does nothing. Spending resets it to 0.
- Re-triggering refreshes, never stacks. Count-based buffs refill to 100; a timed buff resets its clock.
- Charge buffs survive death. The count-based ones don’t drain while you are down, and the accumulated meter is kept for after a revive.
- Spending is itself a beat input, and it always counts on its own — never merged with a free tap.
- On-beat sweep: spend it exactly on the beat and it also collects every tappable ball whose centre sits inside that 66 px square, each counting toward the combo separately. Charge + two balls on one beat is +3.
A ball sitting over your ship is collected instead of spending the charge. Tap an open part of the bracket square.
The five buffs
You equip one per ship. Focus Fire is free and is every ship’s default; the other four are bought in the Shop.
The game marks the scope for you: a buff that only affects the caster is tagged (self) in the Shop, in the Loadout and on the buff band. The tag is left off the float that rises when you cast, which would otherwise be shouting it at you mid-fight.
| Buff | Price | Scope | Duration | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focus Fire | Free | Self | 100 volleys | Tightens your bullet fan from 5° to 2°, so a wide fan concentrates on one target. Your bullets draw deep orange while it runs. |
| Party Damage | 100k escalating | Party | 30 s | A flat +50% damage to every player, applied to all their bullets, lasers and class abilities. Non-stacking — a fresh trigger from anyone just refreshes the timer. |
| Charge Doubler | 100k escalating | Party | 30 s | Every player’s meter fills 2× faster. It does not touch damage — it is a tempo buff that feeds more charge spends. |
| Clone Ray | 100k escalating | Self | Until it leaves the arena | Spawns a white ghost clone of your ship aimed at the nearest enemy. It drifts slowly outward with no hitbox — enemies pass straight through it — dealing 2× your damage to everything overlapping it every 0.1 s. |
| Doppelgeschoss | 400k flat | Self | 100 volleys | ×2 final damage — bullets, laser, class abilities and the Gemini drone all doubled. Bullets draw as elongated rectangles while it runs. |
Count-based vs timed
Focus Fire and Doppelgeschoss are measured in shots, not seconds: each auto-attack volley you fire spends one of 100 counts, regardless of how many bullets are in the fan. A Bomber’s 36-bullet burst also costs exactly one count. That means a slow-firing build gets far more real time out of them than a fast one.
Party Damage and Charge Doubler are plain 30-second timers, and both count down live in the buff stack. Clone Ray is neither — it is a one-shot spawn, and its icon just flashes in the stack for a second to confirm the cast.
They occupy separate multiplier slots, so a teammate’s Party Damage and your Doppelgeschoss multiply together — ×1.30 × ×2 = ×2.6. They do not overwrite each other.
Equipping and buying
- Buy in the Shop. The three escalating buffs cost 100,000, then 200,000, then 300,000 in whatever order you buy them. Doppelgeschoss is a flat 400,000 that neither escalates the others nor is escalated by them.
- Equip in the Loadout, per ship, from a dropdown of the buffs you own. Every ship defaults to Focus Fire.
- Ownership carries across devices; the per-ship equip is stored with each ship.
In co-op
- Everyone sees everyone’s bar — a matching cyan bar sits under each teammate’s ship.
- Any player can trigger any player’s charge by clicking their ship. The effect is always the owner’s equipped buff, not yours. Hovering a teammate on desktop shows the bracket frame so you know whose charge a click will spend.
- Filling your meter tops up everyone else’s by +10. That bonus is not doubled by Charge Doubler and cannot cascade into another payout.
- The inward cyan ripple, the afterburner surge and the floating buff name all show on every screen, on the ship that triggered it.