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Arcade · Live multiplayer

XS Space

Fly, fight and grab the glowing Xenite in an arena that’s never the same twice.

  • A new map every round
  • Blast rock, grow islands
  • Eight ships to fly

Free in your browser, no download. Needs a keyboard: play on a laptop or desktop.

What’s new

Recent changes to LarkSpark.

All updates →
  1. XS Space v4: a new world to fly in

    XS Space has been rebuilt on new ground. The rock is laid out on a fine hex grid with smooth, straight coastlines, lower slabs and finer painted surfaces, and it redraws the moment a bomb or a Terraformer changes it, so craters open with their blasts and new land appears as it grows. The world now appears all at once when you start a flight, and the picture stays sharp. The storm is a drifting cloud that thins to mist at its edge, with lightning crackling inside, and it drains your energy half as fast. Asteroids are heavy and solid: bombs barely move them, a spinning one flings you along its surface, they are lit from the same side whichever way they turn, and a Terraformer that reaches one turns it into land. The Terraformer also grows right over burnt and cracked rock. Thor’s hammer hits twice as wide, holding the Heart means your shots have no kick, the Icarus’s rear fire (R) now fires backward instead of both ways, at no extra cost, and B switches all your bouncing shots on or off. Your account flies one ship at a time: starting a flight in another tab takes over from the first.

    Play XS Space →
  2. XS Space runs smoother

    XS Space now keeps a smooth frame rate on big and high-resolution screens: it draws at a size your graphics card can keep up with, and the browser scales it up to fill the screen. Rock and asteroids that change shape are redrawn in the background, so a blast never freezes the picture, and each player is only sent the asteroids near them. The screen no longer shakes when you are hit, which looked a lot like lag; the edges of the screen flash red instead. Warping now looks like one: your ship stretches and fades where it was, then grows back in where it lands, and a portal takes you back once and then closes. The energy bar and the leaderboard have a new look to match the game’s art, with each pilot’s element colour beside their name.

    Play XS Space →
  3. XS Space: asteroids break, rock grows back, and sharper bots

    Bombs and mines now bite chunks out of XS Space asteroids and knock them spinning, and a blast that cuts one in two leaves two, while small crumbs scatter a little Xenite. New asteroids drift in from the storm, and the storm eats the ones that drift back out. Craters in the rock slowly grow back once nobody is near. Rest your pointer on any icon, in the item bar on the left or the weapon bar on the right, to see what it does and which key uses it. The Heart now lasts 15 seconds, a Decoy flies for 30, and a Brick drops a bigger wall that stays until it is blasted down. And every action now has a key any laptop has, MacBooks included: items on 1 to 8 in the item bar’s order, abilities on letters round WASD (Q warps, G is stealth, C cloak, X X-Radar, M multifire), and the afterburner never gets in the way of firing. And the bots are sharper: they bomb through thin walls to reach you, stop wasting shots on rock, dive into the storm for a core when they can make it back, get out of the storm by the shortest way, and some fire Terraformers.

    How to play XS Space →