Protector
By Frank Force · MIT license. Source · All credits
About Protector
A side-scrolling defence shooter in the Defender mould, and it asks more of you than shooting. Alien landers are trying to carry off the ten humans on the surface. Shoot a lander while it is hauling one and the human falls, so you have to dive and catch them before they hit the ground and set them down safely. Let a lander reach the top with one and it mutates into something much worse. Lose all ten humans and the planet goes with them.
How to play
Fly along the surface, shoot the landers before they carry a human to the top, and catch any human that falls. Lose all ten and it is over.
Controls
- Arrow keys or WASD to fly
- Z or Space to shoot
- X drops a smart bomb
- C is hyperspace, which moves you somewhere random and is a last resort
What makes it worth playing
- Ten humans to protect, and losing them all ends the game rather than costing a life
- Landers that reach the top mutate into a faster, more aggressive enemy
- You can catch a falling human mid-air and carry them back down
- Smart bombs and hyperspace as panic buttons
Screenshots
Captured from this build on 2026-08-27.
Tips from playing it
- Shoot the lander that is already carrying someone before you shoot the one that is not. A carried human is on a clock.
- Catch falling humans by flying underneath them rather than into them. You want to be below and matching their fall.
- Hyperspace is genuinely random and can drop you into worse trouble. Use the smart bomb first.
Why this game is here, and what we changed
Chosen because Shooting had one game in it and this one has an objective beyond survival, which most arcade shooters do not. It is the only one of this batch that is landscape: we measured canvas fill in both aspects and it uses 26 per cent of a portrait screen against 82 per cent rotated, so the page says to turn the phone. We host it on our own servers, so it loads straight into the page with no third-party ad code and no pre-roll video, and its MIT licence is kept alongside it. We played it through at phone size on 2026-08-27 before publishing this page, and the screenshots above come from that session rather than from the original project.
More on how we pick and fix these: what we changed in the open-source games and how we test a game.
- Category
- Shooting
- Plays in
- Your browser, no download
- Orientation
- Landscape
- Players
- One player.
- Difficulty
- Demanding. You are defending, not just shooting
- Typical session
- 3 to 8 minutes a run
- Last tested by us
- 2026-08-27
- Created by
- Frank Force (MIT)
