Three giant bosses, three phases each, and a hitbox the size of a pixel.

How to survive a bullet-hell boss

Bullet-hell shooters (the genre Japanese arcades called danmaku) look impossible in screenshots and turn out to be a puzzle of patterns. Every attack in Boss Rush has a predictable shape: a ring always expands evenly, a spiral always turns the same way, an aimed shot always starts from the boss. Your job is not to react to every bullet, it is to read the gaps and slide through them.

Your ship is bigger than its hitbox. Only the small white-and-red dot at the centre of the ship can be hit, so you can slip through spaces that look too narrow. Stay low on the screen for ring attacks, since the bullets spread out and leave more space the farther they travel, and move in short taps rather than holding a direction. Lasers always flash a dotted warning line first: leave that lane before the beam fires. The final boss, the Void Warden, sends down whole walls of bullets with one moving gap — slide into the gap early and stay calm rather than chasing it.

Each boss has three phases and changes pattern at roughly two thirds and one third of its health, clearing the screen of bullets as it does. You have two bombs per boss; a bomb erases every bullet, makes you invulnerable for a moment and damages the boss, so keep one for a late phase rather than spending both early. Finishing with lives and bombs in hand adds to your bonus.