Galactix

Defend Earth from destruction from the onslaught of the Xidus fleet. Your state-of-the-art ship is equiped with a limitless supply of ammunition, and in addition has missles, bombs, and a retractable claw used for retrieving ship upgrades during the heat of battle. Play Galactix online!

Galactix game description

Galactix is an interesting take on the vertical space shooter. Instead of one-shot kills, your ship has an energy meter that slowly regenerates after taking damage. Power-ups include bombs (which destroy everything on the screen), missiles (which fire straight and do a lot of damage to one target), energy refills, and weapon upgrades. Instead of floating downwards, the power-ups float upwards and off the screen, and must be grabbed with a claw that extends and retracts at a fixed rate, all while continuing to dodge enemy fire. Enemies attack in predictable waves: the first wave consists of ships that fire missiles, the second wave consists of ships that fire waves, the third wave consists of ships that fire homing shots that follow your ship, the fourth wave consists of a mix of all three types of ships, and the fifth wave consists of a mix of all three types of ships and a mini-boss.

This repeats until a boss fight in Wave 49, after which your own ship and the enemy ships are “upgraded”, which seems to affect only their appearance, and the pattern continues until the final boss in Wave 99. The mini-boss drops a weapon upgrade that cumulatively adds more shots, first by adding a cannon in the middle of the ship and later by widening the ship to add more guns. All of the weapon upgrades are lost if the ship takes too much damage. After a few upgrades, the ship is virtually invincible, except that the ships with homing weapons from the third wave (waves ending in 3 or 8) can hit you enough times to cost you your weapon upgrades no matter how careful you are, so the safest strategy seems to be use a bomb immediately in every wave ending in 3 or 8 after acquiring the first weapon upgrade, and optionally using missiles to destroy the ships with homing weapons in the waves ending with 4 and 9.

Destroy the mini-boss last with the claw ready to grab the weapon upgrade, and it should be easy (and repetitive) to get all the way to the big boss – which is no match for you if your weapons are fully upgraded, but almost impossibly hard if you lose the weapon upgrades. That’s basically the story of the game: it’s impossibly easy if you can fully upgrade your weapons and keep them upgraded, and almost impossibly hard if you don’t. Galactix is an odd case because v1.5 declared the game “free shareware”, which meant freeware – the game could no longer be registered and all 99 waves were playable – but the game was re-released for Windows as shareware again. There are 99 waves in this game, with only the first 15 playable in the Windows shareware version.

Play Galactix online

You can play Galactix online here, in web browser for free!