Mars Attacks

Fly a fighter over a real NASA Mars horizon. Rescue colonists from tractor beams and hold five bases in this Defender / Dropzone arcade remake.

Action · Arcade · Free / pay-what-you-want · Windows & Linux · English · Godot · Heart Scale 2026

Mars Attacks is a Godot remake of Heart Scale's 2004 DirectDraw game Mars Attack — a wraparound horizon shooter in the spirit of Defender and Archer Maclean's Dropzone.

You fly a dusty NASA-style fighter over real Mars panoramas. Saucers are beaming the colony into what they insist is a diplomatic picnic. It is not a picnic. Catch the crew, dump them on the silo pad, and clear every flyer before the nest owns the red pebble.

Play

• Rescue scientists, engineers, mechanics and workers. Catch a falling colonist for a bonus; a splat costs the war.
• Fly low over the glowing pad to deposit. Too high and the pad flashes red.
• Smart bombs wipe saucers on screen (androids ignore them). Cloak for a brief stealth burst.
• Killed flyers drop lettered pods: S shield, G guns, B bombs, H homing, L life, C cloak.
• Ten waves at each of five fronts — Olympus, Valles, Hellas, Elysium, Polaris — then a carrier lift to the next base. The war is won only after Polaris.

Controls

Action	Keys	Pad
Fly	Arrows / WASD	D-pad / left stick
Fire	Space / Z	A
Smart bomb	Ctrl / B	B
Cloak	C / Shift	X
Pause	Esc	Start
Fullscreen	F11	Back
Mute	M	Y

Hold up to fight the ship's gravity. The scanner at the bottom is the whole 6.4 km horizon of the base you are flying — same sky, hills, and walking dirt, mapped 1:1.

The bake sale

Chief scientist Dr. Lila Voss beamed a charity advert into deep space: "HELP MARS. WE'RE BROKE AND DUSTY." In Zorblan that is how you open a formal duel, announce huge guns, and insult someone's mother. They RSVP'd with tractor beams.

Credits

• Code, SFX, Godot remake — Heart Scale (2004 / 2026)
• Title globe — NASA/ESA/STScI Hubble Mars, 29 December 2024
• Horizons — NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Curiosity Mastcam PIA26552, PIA26477, PIA26560; NASA/JPL-Caltech InSight PIA23140; NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M Phoenix PIA13804