Ricochet Raiders

About Ricochet Raiders

Ricochet Raiders is a free puzzle shooter built on one rule: a defender's shield only covers the side it faces, and every defender in the chamber faces your launcher. Fire straight at one and the shot dies on the shield. The same shot arriving from the flank goes through it, and keeps going — which is why a good line is worth more than a good aim.

Every chamber has walls, blocks to bounce off and, from the second chamber on, mirrors you can turn. A mirror is a move: select it, turn it thirty degrees, and the geometry of the whole room changes before you have fired a shot. The preview shows you your shot and its first bounce. What happens after that is the part you work out yourself.

Twenty chambers, and new things in the way

A raid runs twenty chambers deep and the difficulty climbs a step every two of them, but the point is not that the numbers go up. Each step brings something the room can be made of that was not there before: round bumpers, which turn a shot by an amount that depends on where it lands; heavies, which take a plate off on the first clean hit and need another; turners, whose shield spins as they walk so last turn's angle expires; runners, which close on you nearly twice as fast as anything else; and barriers, which seal the room wall to wall until you find the switch. Bosses wait at chambers 7, 14 and 20.

The clock is the survivors

There is no timer. Every time you fire, the defenders still standing take a step toward your position, and the raid ends when one of them reaches it. So the number of shots you get is the number they give you, and a shot that takes three of them buys you the turns that a shot taking one does not.

Generated, then checked

Chambers are not hand-built and they are not simply random. Each one is generated and then tested before you ever see it: thrown away unless a straight shot fails to clear it, unless a bounce can, unless the winning angle is wide enough to actually hit with a drag, and unless it can be finished inside the shots the defenders allow. Most of what the generator makes never ships.

Powers, and why they are optional

After every chamber you pick one of three cards — a blast on each kill, a freeze on each blocked shot, a chain to a nearby defender, a shot that forks in two after its first bounce, an extra bounce on every shot, or a preview that looks one bounce further ahead. None of them is ever required. Every chamber is checked against the bare launcher, so a power is a stronger way through a room you could already solve.