Action games

Action games

The useful way to read this shelf is as a stopwatch. Every one of the six titles gives you a different amount of time to make up your mind, and that number — half a second, two seconds, half a minute — predicts whether you will enjoy it far better than the artwork does. Arranged that way, a label that sounds like a genre turns into something you can actually choose from.

Half a second: Traffic Racer

You are moving along a road with other cars occupying most of it, picking the gap you are going to take. A decision arrives roughly every half second and one wrong call ends the run outright. There is no planning layer at all, only continuous reading of what is directly ahead. This is the fastest thing on the shelf and the least forgiving.

Around two seconds: the stick-figure titles

Stick Soldier and Stick Monkey strip a game down until one timed press is all that is left. Stick Soldier sets that press against snow-covered mountains and grey cliff faces under a starry night sky, with your best score parked at the bottom of the screen. Two seconds is roughly the window between seeing what the game wants and committing to it — long enough to feel deliberate, short enough that you cannot deliberate.

Thirty seconds and upwards: holding a gate

Kingdom Defense puts you behind a stone wall with a wooden gate while a skeleton army in iron helmets walks in from the left and flaming arrows cross the screen in both directions. Your decisions land before the enemy arrives, which makes this the only group on the shelf where you can genuinely be wrong in advance. Warriors VS Evil Spirits runs on the same logic.

Mad Scientist sits slightly apart from all three: a dark blue laboratory, angular metal surfaces, curved pipework across the walls and glowing arrows marking the route. It is the densest-looking thing here from the first frame.

What is missing, stated plainly

There is no one-on-one fighting game on this shelf. Most people who click a label called action are hoping for exactly that, so leaving the assumption standing would waste six clicks. Six titles, none of them a fighting game, and if the library ever acquires one this page changes to match.

Two of the six are borrowed from elsewhere

Two titles here also live under other labels. The gate-defence game is filed under both this shelf and the strategy shelf, and the traffic game carries three labels at once — this one, racing and sports.

We do not trim the extra labels to make each shelf's number look tidier. A label is a path, and different people walk different paths to the same game: someone searching for base defence and someone searching for something fast-paced should both be able to arrive.

Sorting out the word action

Why does a car game count as action?

Because on this shelf action describes the tempo of the decisions, not the subject matter. Dodging obstacles in fractions of a second fits that description as well as anything, so the source catalogue applies both labels, and both are correct.

Where should a newcomer start?

With the stick-figure titles. One button, and the entire rule set is legible from the first screen. Leave the gate defence until later, since it asks you to learn what goes where before it asks you to be quick.

What does it look and sound like?

Cartoon line art with combat drawn in flat colour, and sound effects in most titles. That is a description of what appears on screen and nothing more — we hold no verified information about anything beyond that, so we make no claims about it.