Bravo Nine — Twenty missions, one squad, nobody left behind

What is Bravo Nine — Twenty missions, one squad, nobody left behind

Bravo Nine is a top-down squad shooter played on twenty fixed maps, from a beach landing to the command level of a bunker. You run a fireteam: two recruits follow you and fire on their own. Every mission asks for something beyond survival — reach the hostages, find the keycard that matches the door, hold a terminal until the power drops, step on four plates in the right order, or put down the heavy guarding the way out. Extraction opens only once the briefing is ticked off, and your score comes as much from speed and marksmanship as from bodies on the floor.

A run is five reinforcements long. Lose the squad and the mission restarts from the drop point with one fewer; win a boss mission and you get one back. Between missions you pick one of three field promotions — heavier rounds, a bigger magazine, an extra recruit, one health point a second — so the twentieth mission is fought by a very different soldier than the first. The service rifle never runs out of ammunition, so you are never disarmed, only slower. Everything else is picked up off the floor and lost when it runs dry.

How to play

1. Move with WASD or the arrow keys and aim with the mouse, holding the left button to fire; on a phone the left half of the screen is a floating stick.
2. Hold E beside a terminal, press G for a grenade, R to reload early and Q to swap between the service rifle and the weapon you picked up.
3. Walk into a hostage to make them follow you, and in the plate rooms count the dots on each plate — one to four — and step on them in that order.
4. Reach the extraction tile to bank the mission, choose one of the three promotions offered, and carry on until mission twenty or until the reinforcements run out.

Strategies that work

• The clock pays twelve points a second under par, and par runs from seventy seconds on mission one to two hundred and twenty on mission twenty. Clearing the first map in twenty seconds is six hundred points, the same as fifteen kills. Take the shortest line to the objective and leave the stragglers to the recruits.
• The accuracy bonus is four hundred points times your hit rate, and the trench gun counts each of its six pellets as a separate shot, so one missed blast costs six on the tally. Fire it in a doorway where all six land, and go back to the rifle beyond half a room.
• Read the enemy by colour. Orange snipers have eighteen health — two rifle rounds — but hit for twenty-two from twelve tiles, further than anything else on the map. Purple heavies have fifty-eight health and only reach four or five tiles, so walking backwards keeps you untouched.
• Barrels and mines are free damage if someone else stands next to them. A barrel does fifty-two across three tiles and sets off the next one; a mine arms on anything within half a tile, enemies included. On the minefield maps let a patrol cross for you, but keep the hostage line clear.
• Every fourth mission is a heavy. The chargers on missions eight and sixteen freeze for half a second before dashing: step sideways, not backwards. On missions twelve and twenty the shield generators make the boss immune, so break the ninety-health generators first — below sixty per cent the Warlord adds rings of eleven bullets, sixteen below thirty.

A little history

Bravo Nine was written for puzzle-me.com and adapts no existing game. It sits in the fixed-camera arcade line from Gauntlet in 1985 to Smash TV in 1990: a whole floor visible at once, a character who moves and aims independently. From puzzles it takes its structure — each of the twenty maps is drawn by hand and never changes, so it can be learned instead of merely survived. Keycards, plate sequences and terminals are locks from the dungeon crawl; the promotion between missions comes from the roguelite. Nothing about the maps is random, which is why the daily challenge is the same fight for everyone.

Frequently asked questions