Fly a neon ship through an asteroid field against up to fourteen other pilots. Pick up weapons, stack power-ups, level up mid-fight and pick an upgrade card, and be the one still flying when the kill target falls. It is free, it runs in the tab you already have open, and there is nothing to install and no account to make — choose a callsign and go.
Fifteen pilots. One survivor. Galactic Overkill is a free-for-all arena shooter in the .io game tradition: top-down, instantly playable, no lobby wait, and a match short enough to fit in a break. Under that it keeps a progression layer most browser shooters skip — a career that tracks every mode separately, unlockable ship cosmetics, and achievements that survive between sessions on your own device.
It is also on two platforms you may already be in:
Fifteen pilots, one arena, first to twenty kills takes the match. Bounties mark whoever is running hot, so a lead is a target rather than a coast.
You and your squad against escalating waves, sharing one pool of team lives. Friendly fire is off, salvage and farm nodes fund the next wave, and the frontier expands as you hold it.
Territory control for two to four teams. Capture sectors, hold them while the timer runs, and win on ground held rather than on kills.
Every mode also runs as a private lobby: hit Play With Friends, share the join code, and set the rules yourself — kill target, match length, how many bots fill the arena, and which mutator is live. Read the full mode breakdown.
Full controls, weapons and power-up guide.
Everyone spawns with the same gun. New weapons are offered as upgrade cards when you level up mid-match, so there is no loadout to buy and no unlock grind — what you are flying is what you earned this round, and it resets when you die. Which cards you are shown is random, so no two runs build the same ship.
Power-up orbs float in the arena and decay if nobody takes them: hull repair, fire rate, engines, crit chance, turning, spread, afterburner, pickup magnet, overdrive, shield, double damage and ghost (enemy bullets phase through you). They stack, which is where the name comes from.
XP comes from kills, from cracking asteroids, and from loot crates — a crate drops every five kills in the lobby, takes about eleven hits to break open, and then has to be held for three seconds before it pays out. That three seconds is the fight. Get three kills and you become the bounty: worth bonus XP to everyone else, taking fifty percent more damage, and hunted by the bots from across the map.
On top of that, one daily mutator rotates through every public match: Loot Frenzy, Rapid Fire, Asteroid Storm, Rich Rocks, Warp-Speed Boss, Power Surge or Double XP. Today's is shown on the title screen, and it changes what the correct opening move is.
Progress is stored per device, so a career you build in the browser stays in the browser and one you build in the app stays in the app.
Yes. Every mode, every weapon and every map is free, with no ads mid-match and no pay-to-win. The only thing money buys is the Supporter Pack, which unlocks cosmetic ship skins, trails and name colours and changes nothing about how your ship flies or shoots.
No. Galactic Overkill runs in the browser. Open the page, pick a callsign and you are flying — there is no installer, no plugin and no account to create. There is also a native iOS app and a Discord Activity if you would rather play there.
On a keyboard, WASD or the arrow keys steer and Space fires; S or Down brakes, Enter opens chat, Tab shows the scoreboard. On a phone or tablet, the left thumbstick steers and the right pad fires. A connected gamepad works too: the left stick is a heading you point and go, the right trigger fires, the shoulder buttons brake, and the face buttons pick upgrade cards.
Three. Free-For-All Deathmatch is a 15-pilot last-one-standing race to the kill target. Co-Op Wave Survival puts you and your squad against escalating waves of enemies on a shared pool of team lives. Galactic Conquest is territory control, where two to four teams fight to hold the most sectors when the match timer runs out. You can also open a private lobby and invite friends with a code.
Up to fifteen pilots per arena. If a public lobby is quiet, bots fill the empty slots so the arena is never a ghost town, and they drop out as real players arrive.
Yes. Play With Friends opens a private lobby and gives you a join code to share. Private lobbies work for all three modes and let the host set the rules — kill target, match length, bot count and mutators.
Yes. The browser build has full touch controls and works on phones and tablets in portrait or landscape, and you can add it to your home screen as an installable app. There is also a native iOS build of the same game.
Both. Galactic Overkill is a free native app on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, and it is a Discord Activity you can launch straight into a voice channel so everyone in the call plays together. All three versions are the same game on the same servers, so you are matched with everyone else whichever one you open.
Yes. Any standard gamepad works, in the menus as well as in a match. The left stick is a heading rather than a thrust vector, so you point where you want to go and the ship turns to it; the shoulder buttons brake and the face buttons pick upgrades.
Yes, on your own device. Career stats, achievements and unlocked cosmetics are stored locally in your browser, split per mode, with no account and no server-side profile. Clearing your browser data clears them.
A rule change that rotates once a day and applies to every public match: Loot Frenzy, Rapid Fire, Asteroid Storm, Rich Rocks, Warp-Speed Boss, Power Surge or Double XP. Today's mutator is shown on the title screen.