ANVIL CROWN

Three thousand metres of standing supercell, and one way out: up.

You fly a single-seat storm-runner straight into the shaft of a thunderstorm, climbing toward the thing turning at the top of it. Everything that wants you dead comes down at you out of the cloud — and so does the weather.

Controls

• W A S D — fly. You are moving an airframe with mass, not a cursor.
• Space (or left mouse) — fire.
• Gamepad: left stick to fly, A / RB to fire. On a phone, the left stick and the FIRE pad are drawn on screen.

How it plays

Fly to aim. The cannon fires along the nose, and the nose follows the airframe's own lateral velocity. Crosswind shoves you sideways, so the moment the storm has you, your gun and your heading disagree. Correcting the drift is the aiming.

Walk the trigger. Heat builds with every round. Around a 70% duty cycle you can keep up forever; hold the trigger down and the gun locks out and cools slowly, which is exactly when the storm reaches you. The fight is rhythm.

Read the air. The wind dial and the climb-rate readout on the left flank are not decoration — updrafts and downdrafts change how fast the storm comes at you, and the gusts are what put you into the things falling past.

Watch the strikes. Lightning blinds you for a beat, then lights the entire shaft. That flash is your only clear look at what is already on its way down.

The climb

Altitude is both the score and the clock, across three bands:

• SHELF CLOUD (0–1000 m) — rain, mild wind, strikes far apart.
• STORM CORE (1000–2000 m) — hail, hard crosswind, lightning every few seconds, and the shaft at its darkest.
• ANVIL DOME (2000–3000 m) — thin air, long sightlines, and the Crown descending into frame above you.

At 3000 m the mesocyclone stops being scenery and becomes the fight: a rotating eyewall with an amber core in its throat, three phases deep. Flying into the column under the eye more than doubles your damage, and it is also where its heaviest attacks fall.

Reach the top and break it, or get sheared.

Worth seeing

• The moment a bolt lands and the whole shaft resolves out of the dark.
• The Crown's approach through the ANVIL band, hanging above the climb long before you can reach it.
• Its third phase, when the eyewall starts shedding and the core over-brightens.