Bounce a buggy around a looping crater course, where every pit you jump is still there next lap.
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How to play
The buggy drives itself forward and you control speed, jumps and two directions of fire — forward for what is on the ground, upward for the UFOs overhead. The course is not endless: it is a fixed loop, and when you reach the end you wrap around and drive it again.
Craters must be jumped; rocks and mines can be jumped or shot.
UFOs dive at you and drop bombs that punch fresh craters into the ground.
Every gap persists into the next lap — the ones you jumped, the ones the UFOs made, and the ones you fell into.
So the track degrades as you drive it, and the final lap is the one you made hardest.
You win by completing the required laps and lose by running out of lives, of which you have three.
Controls
Desktop: Left / A to brake, Space / W / Up to jump, Z to fire forward, X to fire up
Phone & tablet: keyboard recommended for precise jumps
Tips & strategy
Shoot the rocks rather than jumping them where you can. A jump you did not need is a jump you might mistime, and shooting leaves the ground intact.
Kill UFOs early. Every bomb that lands is a permanent new crater you will meet again on every remaining lap.
Brake before a cluster. Speed is what turns two close craters into one impossible gap, and the course is not going anywhere.
Remember the lap you are on. A line that worked first time round may have a fresh hole in it by the third.
Falling in is worse than it looks — it costs a life and leaves the pit there for the rest of the run.
Origins
Crater Rover draws on Moon Patrol, released by Irem in 1982 and widely credited as the first game with true parallax scrolling: several layers of background moving at different speeds, which gave a flat screen real depth for the first time.
You bounce a buggy across cratered ground, jumping pits and rocks while firing both forward and upward. The jump is the whole difficulty, because it is also your only dodge — clearing a crater leaves you committed in mid-air with something about to fly into the space you are heading for. The course is on a timer too, so the cautious approach of stopping to shoot everything is its own kind of failure.
About Crater Rover
Crater Rover is an original free browser revival of the classic lunar-buggy side-scrolling shooter. Play instantly in your browser, no install needed.
A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.
