Hurricane.io

About Hurricane.io

Hurricane.io is an eat-and-grow game where you are the weather. You start as a wisp of wind on the edge of a city and steer it into anything small enough to lift — benches, lamps, cars, trees — and every thing you swallow makes you bigger.

Seven rival storms are doing the same thing on the same map. Grow past one of them and you can swallow it too; get caught by a bigger one and you start again. Each round lasts three minutes and the most points wins.

Sixteen maps

Palm-lined coasts, farmland, snowfields, desert towns and dense city blocks, each with its own scenery to eat. Anything you swallow grows back after thirty seconds, so the map never runs dry.

Controls

Move the mouse to steer — there is no clicking. On a phone or tablet, touch and drag. Green labels are storms you can swallow, blue ones are shielded for a moment after they appear.

How to play Hurricane.io

1. Start a round. You and the seven rival storms appear evenly spaced on a ring around the middle of the map, and every storm begins at the same size with nothing eaten.
2. Point the mouse where you want to go (or drag a finger on a touchscreen). Your storm follows the pointer, so small, steady movements are easier to control than big swings.
3. Sweep up the smallest scenery first. Benches, lamps and other clutter are the only things a fresh storm can lift, and they get you to the size where cars and trees become possible.
4. Keep an eye on the name labels. A green label means that storm is small enough for you to swallow; anything else is either bigger than you or still protected.
5. Play the full three minutes. When the clock runs out the storms are ranked by points, and if two are level on points the one with more kills finishes higher.
6. Open the Career tab afterwards to see how the round has moved your level and milestones along.

Hurricane.io tips and strategy

• Use the head start. The computer storms hold off eating for roughly the first eight seconds of a round, so the opening is the cheapest growth you will get all game. Go straight for the nearest cluster of small props.
• Climb the size classes in order. Scenery comes in five classes worth 3, 8, 24, 55 and 110. You need a mass of about 12 before the second class will move at all, 40 for the third, 120 for the fourth and 300 for the biggest objects, so there is no point circling a building you cannot lift yet.
• Do not chase a blue label. A storm that has just appeared is shielded for about three seconds. Spend that time eating nearby scenery and come back once its label turns green.
• Plan a loop, not a line. Because eaten objects regrow after thirty seconds, a circuit through two or three busy areas keeps feeding you, while drifting off across empty ground wastes time.
• Expect growth to slow down. Your width rises with the square root of your mass, so each extra bit of size costs more than the last. Once the small stuff stops making a visible difference, the larger props and smaller storms are where your points are.
• Kills settle close finishes. Two storms on equal points are separated by kills, so swallowing even one small rival late on can be worth more than another lap of scenery.

Scoring and the career explained

Each round is self-contained: everyone starts from nothing, and the leaderboard at the end is simply points first, kills second. There is also a cup format, in which points, kills and round wins are carried across several rounds into a running table, so a storm that finishes second every time can still top the standings.

The career is worked out from every match you have played in that browser. Your points count once, each kill is worth an extra 100 and each round win an extra 500, and your level rises with the square root of that total. In practice level 2 arrives at 1,000, level 3 at 4,000 and level 4 at 9,000, which is why wins matter far more than one huge score.

The sixteen maps play differently because of what is on them. Farmland and snowfields are open and spread out, while dense downtown blocks and dockyards pack bigger objects close together, which rewards a storm that has already grown past the early size classes.