Our biggest, loudest original: a full-fat Chicken-Invaders-style shooter saved from being a clone by the one thing everyone actually wants to shoot — the pests that ruin a city summer. Deep, juicy, genuinely funny, and — now that every dive and shot is telegraphed — tough but fair.
Pest Wipeout is the most game we've ever put on the site, and it started from a joke that turned out to be a good idea: nobody feels anything shooting cartoon chickens, but everybody has wanted to vaporise a mosquito at 3am. So you pilot a neon bug-zapper along the bottom and HOLD to fire straight up, while the city's worst fly in and lock into a sweeping formation before peeling off, one at a time, to dive-bomb you. Every wave introduces ONE new pest before it starts mixing them, so you meet each threat cleanly: cyan mosquitoes that jitter in a nervous zig-zag, houseflies that loop, armored purple roaches that soak three hits, wasps that spit golden stingers at wherever you're standing, and crows that swoop on broad black wings. Making you hold the trigger rather than spray on auto is what earns the depth — positioning and trigger discipline both matter — and the coordinated formations (tidy grids, then rings, vees and diamonds later on) finally give you something worth aiming at instead of a random drizzle of bugs.
The rest of the depth is in the arsenal and the combo. Green spray-can gifts drop from kills and drift down for you to catch; grab them and your zapper climbs level by level, from a single pulse toward a screen-wide eight-way spread that melts a whole formation in a pass. Bug-coins fall for bonus points, a cyan bug-shield buys you a few seconds inside a protective bubble, and every few waves the run pauses to let you CHOOSE an upgrade — wide zap, bug shield or a bonus-buzz payout. But every hit costs a life, resets your combo, AND knocks your weapon down two levels, so those levels are a lead you have to defend, not a staircase you just climb. Each pest pays its base (6 for a mosquito up to 22 for a roach) times a combo that never hard-caps and only breaks when you get tagged, so a clean wave is worth many times a sloppy one, and the screen tips into overdrive when you're cooking. Every fifth wave is a multi-phase boss with its own health bar and knock-off shield pips — the King Roach hides behind plates you shoot off first, the Fly Queen carpet-bombs and summons her brood, and the Crow Commander sweeps a violet screech-beam and calls in crows — and after the third they loop back tougher so a good run never dead-ends.
The honest flaws are the ones the genre always carries. This is a well-worn shape; the theme, the art and the juice are our contribution, not the core loop, and a purist could rightly call it Chicken Invaders in a roach costume. We fixed our worst early sin — the unfair wall of fire — by telegraphing everything: a dashed line traces exactly where a diver will go before it commits, a yellow warning triangle flags any pest about to shoot, and the first couple of waves send only one attacker at a time, so a death is now yours to own. What's left is the level-loss spiral: get clipped once in a busy late wave and you're suddenly two levels weaker, which makes the next hit likelier, which makes you weaker again, and a strong run can unravel in about four seconds. We softened it with the bug-shield and 1.2 seconds of blinking invulnerability after each hit, but a truly bad late wave can still bury you. When it flows, though — spread roaring, combo climbing, a boss popping in a shower of green — it's the most fun we've built.
One more thing we're quietly proud of: it's all drawn in code, not stamped from a sprite sheet. Every pest, the zapper and the bosses are procedural 2.5D cel-shaded art — a thick dark outline, a lit base, one shadow and one glossy highlight — so a mosquito reads as a mosquito at a glance and the whole cast animates, recolours and dies without a single imported asset.
A candid breakdown from the developers who designed and built this game: what we're proud of, and where it still falls short.
