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Neon Core puts you in the middle of the screen and leaves you there. You never move. The only thing under your control is which way you are pointing, and the turret fires by itself the moment it has a heading, so the entire game reduces to a single question asked sixty times a second: of everything currently closing in on me, which one do I turn to face?

That framing is what makes it harder than it looks. In a normal shooter a bad situation can be walked out of. Here the threats arrive from a full circle at once, spawning off-screen at every angle, and turning to deal with one means turning your back on the rest. There is no safe arc. There is only the arc you have decided to ignore for the next second.

Difficulty is chosen at the start and changes three things together: how much health the core has, how quickly enemies appear, and how fast they travel. Easy gives you 150 health against slow arrivals; Hard gives you 70 against enemies moving well over twice as fast and spawning at more than double the rate. Each difficulty keeps its own best score, so a good Easy run does not quietly overwrite what you managed on Hard.

The roster is wider than most browser shooters bother with. Scouts and drones are throwaway single-hit chaff. Wasps, vipers and dashers weave rather than fly straight, which makes them awkward to lead. Lancers are the fastest thing in the game and hit hard for something so fragile. Weavers and ghosts sit in the middle. Splitters, as the name warns, do not politely die on the first kill.

At the heavy end are tanks, pulsars, guardians and titans. A titan takes twenty hits, crawls in at less than half the speed of everything else, and does forty damage if it lands - well over half your health bar on Hard. It is the clearest illustration of the game's central trade: the thing that is easiest to hit is also the thing you cannot afford to leave until later.

In practice the enemies that kill you are rarely the ones you were watching. They are the fast, cheap ones that came in behind while you were grinding down something large.

Roughly a quarter of everything that spawns is a pickup rather than an attacker, and they drift in exactly like enemies do, so collecting one means shooting it. The list is long: rapid fire, spread, side and rear guns, a clone that doubles your firing origin, barrage, blast ammo, ricochet, homing, piercing rounds, chain lightning, a railgun, a red laser, orbiting saw blades and proximity mines.

Then there are the panic buttons. Nuke wipes the field and scores every kill. Nova fires a triple burst in all directions. Shockwave physically hurls everything four hundred and fifty pixels outward, buying you a breath rather than a rescue. Black hole drops a gravity well wherever the pickup was collected. Freeze slows spawning to a third of its normal rate.

The distribution is not uniform, and this is the design decision most worth knowing. Heal is weighted about twelve times more heavily than anything else in the pool, and it is removed from the pool entirely while you are already at full health. The game is quietly steering repairs toward you exactly when you need them and withholding them when you do not, which is why runs tend to end in a sudden collapse rather than a slow decline.

Core health is the wide bar and it only ever goes down through contact. Nothing shoots at you; damage happens when something reaches the middle. Heal pickups restore thirty points and cannot take you above your starting maximum, so the health you began with is a ceiling for the whole run.

Shields are counted separately and stack without limit. Each one absorbs a full hit regardless of how much damage that hit would have done, which makes a banked shield worth far more against a titan than against a drone. If you are holding shields and see something enormous coming, the correct play is often to let it land.

Spawn rate tightens as your score climbs, dropping steadily toward a hard floor, so the pressure increase is continuous rather than arriving in waves. There is no level structure and no end. The run stops when the core does.