Sixty-four hostages are held in enemy barracks across the border. Fly your VTOL gunship out, crack the barracks open, land beside the survivors, load up to 8 at a time and ferry them home to the landing pad at base. Lose all lives — or all hostages — and the mission fails.
Left half of the screen is a virtual stick — drag to fly. FIRE shoots, hold to keep shooting. The nose now swings automatically toward the way you fly, and your cannon fires along the chopper's actual inclination — dive slightly to rake ground targets. BOMB (or C) releases a free-falling bomb straight down — huge blast radius, so keep hostages clear. TURN toggles the facing forward stance that fires straight up at jets. Hover low and steady over hostages to load them.
WASD or arrows — fly · C / B — drop bomb · SPACE — fire · SHIFT — rotate · E — flare · P — pause · M — mute
Every sector runs on a hard clock shown at the top of the HUD. Sector 01 gives you the most room; each sector after it tightens the window while the hostage count climbs. At 90, 60, 30 and 10 seconds command calls it out. Hit zero and the run is scrubbed. Every second left on the clock is worth 8 points, so a fast, clean sweep pays.
No two sectors share a skyline. Prisons sit on hilltops, on cliff ledges, inside quarry terraces and down sinkhole shafts you must descend into. Watch the ground line — it climbs, drops away and undercuts, and a hard contact still breaks your gear.
The final mission plays by its own rules. A coolant flood rises behind the containment dam for the whole run: cells on low ground drown first, so work uphill and leave the high cells for last. The flood takes their armour too — anything left in the trench goes under with it. Sentinel pylons replace shells with a tracking beam; when the emitter glows you have about a second before it fires, and ridgelines cut it. The Architect cannot be damaged at all until its three orbiting shield nodes are destroyed, and they rebuild until its core is nearly gone.