Squadron

Keep moving, always

Sitting still in Squadron gets you killed. The formation above rains shots back down, and a stationary ship is the easiest target on the screen, so treat side-to-side motion as your default state. Drift even when nothing is bearing down on you right now. You steer left and right and fire upward, and that's the entire toolkit, which is why position is everything. The moment you park to line up a shot is the moment a stray bullet finds you, and the habit of constant motion costs nothing once it settles into your hands.

Thin the formation the smart way

The other half of staying alive is shrinking the swarm before it shrinks you. Spraying fire across the whole formation leaves it evenly dangerous everywhere. Instead, pick one column of attackers and clear it top to bottom, carving a safe lane you can retreat into when the return fire gets thick. Then start on the next column and widen the lane. Remember that the rows are pressing downward the whole time, so every attacker you leave alive is both a gun pointed at you and one step closer to the bottom of the screen. The lower they get, the less time you have to react to their shots. Never let a wave settle in low while you snipe around its edges: clear it before it reaches you or the run ends there. Think of the wave as a clock as well as an enemy: height on the screen is time on your side, and every kill buys a little back.

Divers come first

Attackers peel out of the formation and swoop at you, and those divers are always the priority. The ships still holding formation can wait a beat; the one arcing toward your nose cannot. The good news is that a diving enemy follows a fixed arc. Watch a few dives and the paths stop being scary, because you can slide under the curve and pour shots into the diver as it commits, instead of flinching sideways at the last moment. Killing a diver mid-swoop feels like the best moment in the game, and it happens to be the correct play too. If two peel off at once, pick the nearer one and commit to it. Splitting your fire between divers usually kills neither, while a clean kill on the first leaves the second's arc easy to read.

• Never stop moving; a still ship is a free hit for the formation.
• Clear one column top to bottom to open a lane you can duck into.
• Deal with attackers that break formation before anything else.
• Learn each wave's rhythm: the patterns repeat as the speed climbs.
• Stay near the bottom middle when you can; corners cut your escape routes in half.

A descendant of the arcade greats

Squadron sits squarely in the tradition Space Invaders started in 1978. Tomohiro Nishikado spent about a year building that game almost single-handedly for Taito, down to designing its hardware, and the shape he settled on became a whole genre: a lone ship at the bottom, a grid of aggressors above, and a score that only ever counts upward. In Japan the game was such a hit that legend blames it for a national coin shortage. The story is overblown, but the queues were real. Namco's Galaxian arrived in 1979 and added the twist Squadron leans on, enemies that break rank and dive at you rather than marching politely, and Galaga polished the idea in 1981 into one of the most loved arcade machines ever made. The formula has never gone out of style because the tension is so pure: your score climbs with every ship you destroy, and the run only ends when they finally catch you.

Riding out the later waves

Each wave you clear is followed by a faster one, and speed is the main thing that changes, so the habits you build early are what carry you late. Tidy column clearing, early diver calls, constant drift: at double speed there's no time to invent those on the spot, they have to already be reflexes. Expect runs to end suddenly and blame nobody. Then notice how much deeper each attempt goes once the patterns live in your hands instead of your head. That slow creep of skill, wave by wave, is the whole pleasure of this kind of shooter, and it's why the genre has kept players feeding it for almost fifty years.