Apache Commander

Fly an AH-64 through three hostile theatres, destroy ground and air targets, and outlast the boss waiting at the end of each run.

Objective

Survive a left-to-right scrolling sortie across three levels — Contested Valley, Desert Storm, and Underground Fortress. Reach the end of each terrain run to trigger a boss fight; defeat the boss to advance. The run ends when your lives reach zero, either from depleted armor under fire or an instant crash into terrain. Beating all three bosses triggers victory.

Controls

Input	Action
←  →	Move left (full speed) / right (60% speed)
↑  ↓	Climb / descend
Space	Machine gun (hold to fire, 6-frame cooldown)
B	Launch AGM missile (limited stock)
V	Drop bomb (gravity-fed, big blast radius)
Esc	Pause & open settings (heli speed slider)
Enter	Advance to next level on the clear screen

How it works

• Three weapons, three damage tiers — bullets do 1 damage, AGMs do 5, and bombs do 10 in an 80px ground radius. You start each life with 10 missiles and 5 bombs; the gun has unlimited ammo.
• Armor and lives — each life has 5 armor blocks. Enemy bullets and air collisions cost one block; armor refills only via the A powerup. Hitting the ground, ceiling, or any vegetation is an instant crash that bypasses armor and costs a full life.
• Ground & air targets — bunkers (3 HP, 200) and tanks (4 HP, 300) hold the ground; helis (3 HP, 100), planes (2 HP, 150), and jets (2 HP, 300) attack from the air. Tanks track and lead your position; jets streak past quickly.
• Bosses — Level 1 Heavy Tank (40 HP), Level 2 Gunship (55 HP, flying), Level 3 Mobile Fortress (70 HP). Each boss has heavy armor against your machine gun: only every 4th, 3rd, or 5th bullet respectively lands a point of damage. Missiles and bombs always land full damage.
• Powerups drop from killed enemies. A refills armor, M refills missiles to 10, B refills bombs to 5, + grants an extra life, S spray (3-way), O shield (absorbs one hit including crashes), F fire-rate doubles gun speed, W multi-barrel (twin-stream).
• Underground Fortress quirk — Level 3 adds a hard cave ceiling and destructible stalactites (3 HP each). Shoot one down and the falling rock crushes anything in its path for 10 damage in a 60px radius — including you.
• Hit consequence — any hit that costs armor or a life immediately strips all active powerups (spray, fire-rate, multi-barrel). Only the shield is consumed as a separate save.

Scoring

• Ground kills: bunker +200, tank +300.
• Air kills: heli +100, plane +150, jet +300.
• Boss kills: Heavy Tank +2,000, Gunship +3,000, Mobile Fortress +5,000.
• Lives bonus: at every level-complete screen, lives × 500 is added to the run total.
• No multipliers — the scoreboard is a flat sum. Maximizing score means killing more targets, not killing them faster, and surviving with as many lives as possible into level 3.

Strategy

• Hover at mid-altitude. Cruising at canvas mid-height keeps you clear of the ground (instant crash) and the cave ceiling (also instant). Tank shots are clamped to a 45° cone — height is the cheapest defense against them.
• Don't waste missiles on bunkers. Bullets kill a bunker in three shots. Save AGMs for tanks at distance, jets crossing the screen, and direct boss hits where each missile shaves 5 HP regardless of armor.
• Bombs are crowd control. A bomb's 80px radius and 10 damage will one-shot a cluster of bunkers and tanks at once — drop one whenever the ground packs three or more targets, not on single bunkers.
• Move forward sparingly. Right-arrow drives you only at 60% speed but tilts the nose down for a steeper attack angle. Stay near the left edge to maximize reaction time to spawning jets and rising tank shots.
• Powerups before greed. Any hit clears your spray/fire-rate/multi-barrel stack. If you're carrying two stacked weapon mods, play defensively until the next checkpoint — one careless bullet erases them all.
• The shield is your "get out of crash free" card. Unlike armor, the shield (O) absorbs a terrain hit too. Hoard it for the Underground Fortress where the cave ceiling and falling rocks make crashes almost inevitable.
• Boss fight prep. Enter every boss with full missiles and at least one bomb. The Heavy Tank's spread shot, the Gunship's flying spray, and the Fortress's 7-round arc each need to be dodged sideways — vertical movement is too slow to clear an arc.

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