Ionstorm — complete guide

Move

Touch anywhere to place a virtual joystick. Drag to move your ship. Your weapons auto-fire — your only decision is position.

Level up

Enemies drop emerald XP gems. Collect enough to level up. Every level-up offers three choices: take one. You can hold up to four weapons and four passives, each capped at level 5. Catalysts — run-altering modifiers — join the draft once you hold a second weapon or reach level 4: up to three of them, three levels each.

Enemy scaling

Enemy HP and damage scale continuously with game time. Mites appear from the start; Darts arrive around 40 s, Husks at 90 s, Splitters at 2:15, Wraiths at 2:50, and Titans at 3 min.

Survive

Your integrity is your health. Enemies damage on contact. A short invincibility window (0.6 s, or 0.7 s after a boss body-check) activates after each hit. Zero integrity ends the run.

Storm Surges

Roughly every 70 seconds — the first at 75 s — a telegraphed swell dumps a batch of enemies plus an elite escort on you for 12 seconds. The swell starts at 10 extra spawns and grows by one per 40 seconds of run time, capped at 28. Surges are suppressed while a boss is alive.

Rerolls and banishes

You start each run with one reroll, which redraws all three level-up cards. Every boss kill banks another. Clearing a Rift Signal banks a banish instead: it removes one card's upgrade from the run's draft pool for good, so you can cull a dead end and steer toward an evolution.

What it is

A Rift Signal is an off-screen objective marker. The first one opens between 2:45 and 3:30 depending on your run seed; each later one follows 115–170 seconds after the last. An arrow on the edge of the screen points toward it, and the marker drifts toward you at 80 px/s.

Engage it

Move onto the marker before its 42-second travel timer runs out. That spawns a Rift Guardian — an elite Titan that chases hard and fires aimed plasma volleys — and starts a fight timer: 44 seconds for an early rift, 40 seconds once you are past roughly 4:20.

Kill it

Destroy the Rift Guardian before the fight timer expires. On kill: 14 XP gems worth 6 each scatter around the rift, a 34-point repair mote drops, and you bank one banish for the level-up draft.

Miss it

If the timer runs out, the rift closes with no reward — and the Guardian stays on the field hunting you. If you never reach the marker inside its 42-second window, it expires quietly and no Guardian ever spawns.

First appearance

The Collapsar arrives at 6:40. It enters from just beyond the screen edge and cannot be avoided — it comes to you, and the horde keeps spawning during the fight.

The rotation

Bosses cycle in a fixed order: The Collapsar, The Spindle, The Maw, The Prism, then back to the start. Each has its own bulk, speed and volley — the Spindle is the fast charger, the Maw the heaviest, the Prism the densest shooter.

Patterns

Every boss does two things: it fires a radial ring of projectiles every 3 seconds (2.4 for the Prism), and it locks a lane, telegraphs for roughly 0.8 seconds, then dashes along it at over four times its normal speed. The windup is your cue to leave the lane.

Minions

Only The Maw summons — five enemies ringed around it every 5.5 seconds. Prioritize movement over fighting them; keep cycling the arena so your weapons handle them passively.

Kill it

A boss kill drops a relic cache — pick one of three single-use items — plus 18 XP gems, a 42-point repair mote, and a banked reroll. The next boss arrives 2.5 minutes later with more than double the HP of the last.

Build check

The boss cycle is the hardest check your loadout faces. Runs that survive past the second or third boss are well-built. Most good runs start cracking here.