Super Station Swarm

Super Station Swarm

Quick-session tower defense with no ads, no micro-transactions, and nothing in the way of pressing play and shooting things. Your station sits in the middle of the screen. Enemies come from everywhere else. Most of your weapons fire themselves, so the real decisions are smaller: where the station is facing, what you upgraded last wave, whether you remembered to flip aim mode before the flyers showed up.

Everything's drawn with vector lines and circles. No sprites, no textures. Runs are 10 to 20 minutes. Plays on phone, Steam Deck, or desktop - quick endorphin hits for bullet mayhem and numbers go brrrrr!

(Heads up: the trailer cuts in around wave 25, when the screen gets dense. The first few waves are quieter, you'll get a minute to settle in.)

About the auto-aim

Your weapons pick the nearest target and shoot it. Solid plan, right up until a pack of flyers starts orbiting your station and nothing leads them well, or a tank floats through the gap none of your satellites are covering, or an armored scout eats your bullets while three drones drop mines behind it.

On Medium and Hard the auto-aim takes a damage hit too: 20% on Medium, 30% on Hard. You can still clear runs on auto. You're just making it harder than it needs to be. The fix is to lean into manual lead (one toggle, every cannon flips at once), or to lean on the skill weapons. Sweep beam, missile salvo, EMP, power orbs. None of them care about the damage tax.

Missiles, lasers, and railguns always track. Cannons are different. You rotate the whole station to point them. Flipping aim modes mid-wave is the kind of small habit that turns a wave-12 run into a wave-25 one.

Watch for swarm pacts!

Mid-run, a yellow triangle will blink at the edge of the play area. A swarm pact is forming. A V of kamikaze fodder is about to warp in with a bomber tucked in behind, all arcing toward your station on a curved path so you can't just plant your guns down the centre line and wait. The fodder pile into your hull. The bomber detonates a splash radius you can see coming.

Ignore the warning and you eat a nuke. Engage and the rest of the wave is still happening behind you. Pacts get bigger and more frequent the longer you survive. There is no warning on hard mode.

The upgrade cards

Level up, pick 1 of 3 cards. Add a new weapon, boost fire rate on a specific mount, stack pierce, add shield HP, bolt on another satellite. Cards target individual weapon mounts, so upgrading damage on your flak cannon does nothing for the missile launcher sitting next to it. You're building each turret on its own, then watching how they play together.

Slots fill up. Once a satellite's mounts are full, new weapon cards become replacement offers. That homing missile looks great, but the card is telling you it's swapping out your piercing cannon to make room. 17 upgrade types across 8 weapon classes. There's a pity timer so you'll never go 8 waves in a row without a satellite offer.

Dying is fine

Every kill across every run feeds a shared XP pool. The XP buys permanent upgrades: starting weapons, extra satellites, shield stacks, hull, bombs. A skill tree with branching paths and prerequisites. Starting Satellite leads to Satellite Shields leads to Armory Module. Max out Station Hull and you unlock Nano-Repair Swarm.

The catch is that every permanent upgrade you buy adds 3% to enemy wave budgets. The game grows to match you. Five shielded satellites with overcharged weapons feels dominant for about three waves. Then wave 15 arrives and remembers what you bought.

Pick a lane

You can sink everything into a single satellite cannon until it carries the run by itself, while the other four orbit looking decorative. You can spread it instead, five satellites with shield barriers each. Bombs are a third option, the one for when the screen gets too thick to read. The combo system is a fourth lane that runs almost as its own minigame: hit 40 consecutive kills and you trip tier 5, which is a 4x score multiplier, 1.5x fire rate on every weapon, screen-clearing shockwaves, and phantom echo targets that keep your streak alive between waves. Miss one kill window and the whole thing collapses back to zero.

Play It Your Way (As I said to Delores Montenegro)

Three screen filters sit on top of the default vector look. CRT gives you scanlines and chromatic aberration. 8-bit drops everything to four shades of green on chunky pixels. Retro keeps the colour but quantizes it down to 64 shades. Switch from pause whenever. Gameplay is generally unaffected but 8-bit might pose a challenge!

Three difficulty tiers, each with its own leader board. Hard mode triples elite spawn rates, doubles boss frequency, and quadruples enemy HP scaling. Working through the full upgrade tree takes a few hours of runs. Individual runs fit a bus ride or a lunch break - perfect filler for that quick bullet rush through vector carnage!