Deep Blaster

Deep Blaster is a side-scrolling underwater shooter starring a small yellow submarine with a bubble cannon on its nose. The cannon fires by itself, so the whole job is steering: glide up and down through the water, line up with whatever is swimming at you and let the bubbles do the popping. The sub has a bit of momentum, the way anything does underwater, and a slowly draining oxygen meter keeps you moving towards the air pockets that drift in from ahead.

There are five seas to dive through. The Coral Reef is a calm, sunny first sea where you can relax and learn the ropes on grumpy pufferfish and robot minnows. The Kelp Forest adds robot sharks that flash their eyes before they charge, the Shipwreck brings squid that squirt ink all over the screen, the Ice Sea is full of sea mines on chains, and in the Abyss only your headlight and the glowing creatures break the dark. Crab tanks roll along the seabed in every sea. Each sea ends with a boss and every boss attack is signposted before it lands: Grumpus the Mega Puffer, King Clawtank, Madame Ink the octopus guarding her treasure chest, Iron Moby the mechanical whale and Gloomjaw the giant angler, who can only be hurt by hitting the glowing lure. Robots break into cartoon gears and bolts, jellyfish pop into bubbles, and fish just swim off with stars around their heads.

Pickups float in as bubbles you can read at a glance: twin bubbles, piercing harpoon bubbles, a sonar ping that slows everything down and a shield bubble that takes one hit. Torpedoes are saved for the big targets and refilled by pickups. You get three lives and a checkpoint halfway through every sea and again at the boss, and cleared seas unlock the next one on the stage select. Endless is an endless dive that cycles through the seas and keeps getting tougher, with your high score saved in your browser, and the Daily dive gives everyone the same seeded run for the day. Arrow keys, WASD or the mouse to steer and Space for a torpedo on a computer; a thumb stick or a drag through the water and a big torpedo button on a phone. Press P to pause, M to mute.