Cursor Blast

Simple and basic shooter where you can get too powerful very fast, but frequent crashes and broken achievements spoil a lot. The gameplay is simple. You control a spaceship that moves freely across the screen, dodging enemies and their projectiles while shooting back. Enemies approach from the top and vanish once they reach the bottom, but you can fly and fire in any direction since your crosshair follows your mouse cursor. The main goal is to survive each wave by eliminating all foes. If an enemy slips past you, it simply reappears at the top and dives down again. As you advance, waves become faster and more crowded, filling the screen with more opponents and bullets to avoid. Fortunately, your ship can take a few hits, giving you some margin for error. After completing a wave, you’re offered a random selection of four upgrade cards, from which you can choose one. These cards provide bonuses like health recovery, increased fire rate, score multipliers, and other perks. Because the selection is random, you might see duplicate options, which can feel redundant. Cards also vary in rarity, common, rare, and so on, and powerful ones are immediately recognizable. Some of the best upgrades include adding stationary turrets to the battlefield or attaching drone companions to your ship for additional firepower. However, not all card effects stack when collected multiple times. For example, a card that lets your bullets pierce weaker enemies is only useful once, yet it can keep appearing even after you’ve already obtained it, wasting a potential upgrade. The main experience is the standard “space shooter” mode, but there’s also a “beach mode.” In this variant, you choose a few cards at the start and must survive as many waves as possible without gaining new ones mid-run. Overall, the game offers about an hour of light, arcade-style shooting fun. Still, it’s not without flaws. Achievements don’t unlock, and occasional crashes can occur. These crashes often appear before boss battles and might be related to certain upgrades. For instance, repeatedly stacking the rate-of-fire perk allows you to overwhelm enemies in seconds, but it also seems to overload the game, sometimes causing it to crash back to the desktop.