Game Modes

Three modes ship with the game and each one asks for a different kind of nerve. There is no unlock grind between them — all three are available from the first launch, which is the right decision and increasingly a rare one.

Classic Endless: pacing over heroics

Endless is a stamina mode and it rewards restraint. Hazard speed climbs on a timer, so the score you post depends far more on staying alive through the middle sectors than on how many kittens you sweep up early. Our best runs came from ignoring any pickup that required a change of plane, banking the easy rescues, and treating shields as insurance for the sectors past the six-minute mark.

Time Attack: the multiplier is the game

One hundred and twenty seconds sounds generous until you learn that the multiplier decays if you go too long without a rescue. Chaining pickups matters more than the raw count, which turns the mode into a routing puzzle: find the line that touches four kittens without a single braking manoeuvre. This is also the mode where headphones pay off most, because you can hear a pickup enter from off-screen and adjust the line before it appears.

Survival: no safety net

Strip out the power-ups and what remains is a pure test of the flight model. No shield to absorb a misjudged approach, no time slower to bail you out of a bad wave. It is the shortest mode to fail and the most instructive one to practise in — twenty minutes in Survival will fix your braking habits faster than an hour anywhere else.

Which mode to start with

Start in Time Attack. Two minutes is long enough to learn how the pod carries momentum and short enough that failure costs you nothing, and the fixed clock means you are never punished for experimenting. Move to Endless once you can chain three rescues without braking, and save Survival for the point where the drift feels natural rather than hostile.