TRIPOD ATTACK!

The Martians have landed. Belfast is the last free city. You have a rocket launcher.

H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, reimagined as a vector arcade nightmare.

The fighting-machines are here. Their heat-rays are burning through the city, their hoods are impervious to your rockets, and the streets are filling with people fleeing for their lives. You are all that stands between the Martians and the last survivors.

Green vector lines blaze against a black phosphor screen. Tripods buckle and crash under real physics. Rockets tear through the darkness in showers of sparks. The soundtrack is pure 80s arcade, synthesised in code.

Aim carefully. Break their legs. Save the people. Take Europe back.

SHOOT THE LEGS

The hood is armour. The legs are your way in.

Rockets glance harmlessly off a fighting-machine's hood. To bring one down, you must cripple its legs, one by one. Each leg takes several hits, and leave a damaged leg alone for too long and it will reseal.

Commit to a target. Keep the pressure on. Every second you waste is another second the Martians have to kill.

Firing is a fight in itself. Drag back to aim and build power, then release to launch your rocket, just like a slingshot. Judge the angle, commit to the shot, and make it count.

WATCH THEM FALL

They don't just explode. They collapse.

Tripods are physical machines, not scripted animations. Break a leg and watch the wreckage come down under gravity: the hood, the surviving legs and the broken limb all crashing in their own unpredictable ways.

Every collapse is different. Anything underneath is in danger.

That includes the Martians' enemies. That includes the people you're trying to save.

DUCK THE HEAT-RAY

When the lens turns red, get down.

Before a fighting-machine fires, it stops. Its lens glows red. It cries Ulla.

You have been warned.

But the beam doesn't come immediately. The delay varies, so you can never rely on a fixed rhythm. From the fourth sector onwards, the heat-ray sweeps out and back, turning a single attack into a moving wall of death.

Get behind the sandbags. Time your duck. Stay exposed for too long and you'll lose a life.

SAVE THE PEOPLE

You're not just fighting for yourself.

Tiny figures flee through the ruins, running towards the shelter as the Martians tear the city apart.

Get them there alive and earn points. Let a heat-ray catch them, let a falling tripod crush them, or hit them with one of your own stray rockets, and they're gone.

Every shot has consequences. Every rescue counts.

TAKE EUROPE BACK

Ten sectors. Ten cities. One war for humanity.

Fight your way from Belfast to Athens, reclaiming Europe one skyline at a time. Each sector is drawn in glowing vector lines, with landmarks rising out of the darkness.

• Belfast — The Harland and Wolff cranes.
• Edinburgh — The Castle rock.
• Liverpool — The Liver Birds.
• London — Big Ben.
• Paris — The Eiffel Tower.
• Amsterdam — The windmills.
• Berlin — The Brandenburg Gate.
• Vienna — The Riesenrad.
• Rome — The Colosseum.
• Athens — The Parthenon.

Lose all your lives and the Martians retake the last sector you liberated. Your advance can be undone. Your victories must be defended.

Reach Athens. Defeat the invasion. And if you make it through alive, unlock an endless high-score mode set back in Belfast.

The war doesn't have to end.

THREE WAYS TO FACE THE INVASION

Choose your difficulty and fight for a place on the high-score table.

• NORMAL — The invasion begins.
• VETERAN — The Martians won't make it easy.
• MASSACRE — Humanity is running out of time.

Each difficulty has its own high-score table. Survive the invasion, save the people, and prove you can do better than the last defender of Earth.

A WORLD BUILT FROM LINES

TRIPOD ATTACK! is a love letter to the phosphor glow of classic vector arcade machines.

Green wireframe landscapes. Sparks bursting from shattered metal. Towering fighting-machines rendered in luminous lines against absolute black. An 80s arcade soundtrack and sound effects, synthesised in code when the game starts.

No music files. No sound files. Just code making noise.

Even the words are authentic: every line of text in the game comes from H. G. Wells's original 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds.

The invasion may be fictional. The words that describe it are Wells's own.

CONTROLS

Play with a mouse, touchscreen, keyboard or gamepad.

Mouse or touchscreen

• Drag back and release to aim and fire.
• Hold the right mouse button, or the left side of the touchscreen, to duck.

Keyboard

• Arrow keys or WASD — Aim and set power.
• Enter — Fire.
• Space — Duck.
• P — Pause.
• M — Mute.

Gamepad

• Left stick — Aim.
• A — Fire.
• B — Duck.

THE INVASION IS WAITING

Available for Windows, Linux and Android.

Made with Godot 4 by 3BL_Indie, County Down, Northern Ireland.

Inspired by H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898).

The Martians have landed. The cities are falling. Light the fuse.