HELIOBANE

"We built her to kill a star. We never thought we'd have to."

Aurel is an old orange star with five inhabited worlds. Deep in its fire lives the Umbrine, a crystalline hive that eats fusion. When Project SOLACE drilled a siphon into the sun, the hive woke up hungry. In ninety days it took the Tharsis mining belt, the ocean moon Verdigris and the entire Concord battle fleet, which it did not destroy but wore, the way a hermit crab wears a shell.

One ship can still fly where the Umbrine lives: HB-0 HELIOBANE, a prototype gunship built to survive inside a star's corona and deliver a single weapon, the Solar Lance. Her pilot is Wren, a salvage runner with two smuggling convictions and the best reflexes in the system. Her guns were never meant to fight a war, so she takes better ones off the dead as she goes.

HELIOBANE is a vertical shoot 'em up in the tradition of Amiga-era shooters and Tyrian. It looks and sounds like 1993: 320×256 pixels, 32 colours, parallax skies, a tracker soundtrack and digitised speech crushed to 8 bits. It plays like a shooter made now: a locked 60 frames a second, a 4-pixel hitbox, remappable controls and full gamepad support.

Build your gunship

The Heliobane carries two front guns on a rack and swaps between them in an instant, plus a rear gun and two sidekick pods. There are fourteen loadout weapons, from the Pulse Cannon and Scatter Vulcan to homing Seeker Swarms, Drift Mines and an Option Drone that copies your fire, with upgrades through level five in World 1, level six in World 2 and level seven in World 3.

Every gun deals kinetic, beam or blast damage, and the Umbrine grows armour to match. Black glass shrugs off bullets and cracks under beams. Sun-fed flesh drinks your lasers and fires back faster. Concord steel only minds explosions. Bring two guns that disagree.

Between stages Old Mott turns up in his patched salvage tug, the Magpie. He buys the gold-glass Aurum you shake loose from the hive and sells guns he definitely didn't steal from the Concord armoury. Sell anything back for half what you paid, repair your armour, buy flares, and every so often an extra life.

Graze for heat, then break everything

Let enemy bullets pass close without touching you and the heat bar fills. At 50 heat, fire the Breaker: a white-gold column from your nose to the top of the screen. Everything it touches is Breached for six seconds, its plating gone and its sealed cores open. The Breaker itself barely scratches anything; the damage comes from what you fire into the breach.

Flares are the other button, for when it goes wrong: the screen's bullets vanish, everything on it takes a hit, and you get a moment of grace.

Three worlds, fifteen Heralds

The campaign runs inward to the heart of Aurel, outward through the cold wake of what escapes it, and on to Umbra, where the dark was born. Fifteen stages, each ending in a Herald that fills the screen and changes shape as it breaks: the Quarry Maw, a mining platform turned into a mouth; Leviathan Choir, a serpent of stitched drones that sings as it dies; Admiral Husk, the flagship's bridge, still broadcasting orders in the admiral's voice.

Later stages turn the lights off, throw storm winds across the screen, run the scroll backwards, triple its speed, close into corridors you have to learn, and split into two routes through a graveyard of dead planets.

Find the routes Mott left off the map

Each world hides a side route with its own boss and a special front gun: the Rivet Driver, Lamp Drill or Heartstring. Clear the route and Mott can stock the gun on later runs.

Enemy waves vary between runs, changing their timing, positions and numbers while keeping the campaign's stages and Heralds.

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