Turret Rumble

Turret Rumble is a top-down tank arena in the classic flat-shape style: thick outlines, a soft grid and a colour for every tank on the board. You start as a plain circle with one barrel. Squares are worth a little, triangles a bit more, and the blue pentagons in the nest at the middle of the map are worth enough to change your afternoon — if you can hold the nest, which is the one place everybody else wants to be too. Move with WASD or the arrows, aim with the pointer, and the gun fires on its own so both hands stay on the driving.

Every level hands you a point, and the eight stats are the whole game: bullet speed, bullet damage, reload, max health, health regen, body damage, movement speed and bullet range. Pour it all into reload and damage and you melt anything that comes close; stack speed and body damage and you can simply drive through smaller tanks. At levels 15, 30 and 45 you choose a class — twin, sniper, machine gun or flank guard first, then the branches off them, all the way out to octo tanks with eight barrels, annihilators that fire one enormous slug, boosters that fly on their own recoil and rangers that shoot from off the edge of your screen.

Around twenty rivals share the arena with you, and they are playing the same game: they farm, they level, they choose classes, they camp the nest and they pick fights with each other. Some are careless and die a lot, some are careful and farm the quiet corners, and the sharks watch the leaderboard and come looking for whoever is on top. The board, the knockout feed and the minimap tell you exactly how much trouble you are in. Get destroyed and you drop back in at level 1 with a share of your score, so a bad minute never ends the session — it just puts you at the bottom of a board you already know how to climb.