NEON SPACE DEFENDER

Neon Space Defender is an arcade space shooter that gives you rather more to manage than its pace suggests. You choose your spaceship, upgrade both weapons and armour between runs, and hold a bomb that wipes the screen — but only if you spend it at the right moment, which is the real decision the game keeps putting in front of you. A radar system tells you what is arriving before it becomes a problem, so surviving is partly about reading that display rather than only reacting to what is on screen. Endless waves of enemy asteroids escalate steadily, and the controls stay smooth enough on both desktop and mobile that the difficulty comes from the game rather than the interface.