Trixel Rocket - Tip of the day 04 - Lightning Flashes

Trixel Rocket available on iOS today - https://buff.ly/2oBkkKN Here is a tip of the day to help you play. “Lightening Flashes” Website: http://bliz.studio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blizstudio/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blizstudiogames Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlizStudio P

Tip of the day number four for Trixel Rocket, covering the lightning levels — the nebula levels, though what you're actually dodging is lightning zaps. These levels have a tell, and once you know the tell they get dramatically easier.

What you're up against

The nebula levels fill the screen with lightning that zaps at intervals. The detail that matters is that the different lightning bits are timed with very slight differences between them.

So they don't all fire together, and they don't share a single rhythm you can count to. Finding one global beat and moving on it will get you killed.

The tell: a flash and a rotation

Every zap telegraphs itself. There's a slight little flash and a rotation at the point where the lightning is about to strike.

That's your warning. The flash and the rotation tell you a zap is coming at that specific spot, which turns the level from a reaction test into a reading test.

Train your eye to catch that flash and you stop guessing. You're no longer dodging lightning — you're dodging a location that just announced itself.

Two ways through

There are two viable approaches once you can read the tell.

The first is to move between the zaps. Because the timings are slightly offset from one another, there are windows where neighboring bolts aren't active at the same moment, and you can thread the middle.

The second is to move right after a flash. Once a bolt has fired, that spot is briefly safe, so you can bolt through the gap immediately behind it. On a good run you can string three of those together in a row.

Of the two, the post-flash window is more reliable for most players. Threading between bolts requires you to be right about two timings at once. Going through right after a flash only requires you to be right about one.

Don't forget the gems

These levels still have gems to collect, and the run in the video grabs them along the way rather than treating survival and scoring as separate goals.

Plan your gem pickups into the route you were already taking through the safe windows. Detouring for a gem after you've committed to a gap is how a clean run turns into a death.

When it goes wrong

Sometimes you just don't survive, and that's fine. The timings are tight enough that one mistimed move ends the run outright.

The saving grace is that you can always hit replay. There's no real cost to failing a nebula level, which makes it the right place to practice reading the flash until it becomes automatic.