Sky & Soil

You fly up a scrolling battlefield with two weapons that do completely different jobs: a forward shot for anything in the air, and a bomb that falls onto a reticle leading ahead of your ship for anything on the ground. Bombing empty ground is not a wasted shot — it either uncovers something buried, or it builds you cover.

• The zapper fires forward at air targets; the blaster drops bombs on ground targets at the reticle.
• Bombing blank ground raises a defensive mound at that spot, locked to the world rather than to you.
• That mound blocks incoming enemy fire, chipping away a little with each shot it stops.
• Bombing blank ground can also reveal a hidden relic tower for a bonus.
• So every bomb into empty dirt is a choice between shelter now and offence now.
• The mothership is killed by bombing its core rather than by shooting it.

• Desktop: WASD or arrow keys to move, with separate keys to shoot and to bomb
• Phone & tablet: on-screen controls supported on touch devices

• Build cover before you need it. A mound is fixed in the world, so it protects the stretch of ground you laid it on, not wherever you happen to be.
• Cover is consumable. Each bullet it absorbs wears it down, so treat it as a few free hits rather than a wall.
• Keep the reticle ahead of trouble. Bombs land where the reticle is, not where you are, which means aiming is really a matter of timing your approach.
• Do not stop firing the zapper while you bomb. They are independent weapons and neither interrupts the other — players who alternate are doing half the damage.
• Blank ground is never truly blank. It is either a relic or a mound, and both are worth more than the bomb cost.

Sky and Soil draws on Xevious, released by Namco in 1983, whose landscapes were modelled on the Nazca lines and which was among the first games to feel like it was set somewhere rather than nowhere.

Its real contribution is two weapons at once: a forward zapper for aircraft and a bomb aimed with a floating reticle for ground targets. Because they are separate systems fired with the same hand, the game constantly splits your attention between two planes, and much of the difficulty is remembering that the thing about to kill you may be on the ground you have stopped looking at. Hidden bonus towers reward players who bomb apparently empty terrain.

Sky & Soil is an original free browser take on the classic dual-weapon vertical shooter, with selectable difficulty and hidden bonuses to dig out. Play instantly in your browser.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.