Drop

Pick their kit

Two noobs, one arena, no way out. Choose what each of them walks in with.

Drop complete

+$0

You bounced off nothing at all. Aim for the girders.

Paint your noob

Pick a body part, then a colour. The shiny ones cost money you earned by smacking into things. Or hit Draw on him and paint that part yourself.

Settings

Turn the messy bits on and off.

How to get rich

Leap off the crate and go limp. Every part your ragdoll smacks pays out — and every smack x-rays your bones for one second. Hit parts back to back to build a chain multiplier.

A Noob's Day Out is a story you steer. He wakes up in the crate with no memory and no plan, and you pick what he does next. The room changes with the scene and he acts out whatever you choose. Twenty-seven endings, a Read aloud button if you would rather be told it, and Hide if you just want to watch.

Noob Cannon is the one with the tower. Drag back from the launch platform and let go, like a catapult — a dotted line shows where he will go. Knock down the number of blocks named at the top and the next tower is taller; run out of noobs before you get there and you go back to level one. If a tower is beating you, Call in bombs spends $400 on four of them falling out of the sky onto it, and costs you no noobs. Take the legs out from under it rather than picking at the top: anything left with nothing underneath comes down on its own, and a falling block takes out whatever it lands across.

Last Noob Standing is the first-person one. Pick who you are fighting from a roster of noobs with made-up names and a skill rating out of 99 — the rating is real, and it drives how fast they move, how straight they shoot and how much they can take. The Triple mode button at the bottom deals out six of them instead of three and lets you take on three at once for half as much again. In the pit: W A S D to walk, move the mouse to look, click to shoot. On a tablet a thumbstick appears wherever your left thumb lands and walks you, dragging the right of the screen looks around, and the red button fires. Knives, pistols, SMGs, shotguns and rifles lie about on the sand — walk over one to pick it up, and they come back a few seconds after somebody takes them. You start with your fists. Headshots pay double and often take the head clean off.

Colosseum pits two noobs against each other. Pick a weapon and armour for each — sword, axe, spear or club, bare, leather or iron — then set them loose. They walk each other down and swing until one of them stops getting up. The winner pays out.

Slice Lab is the other mode on the home screen: a room of loose noobs, no falling required. Pick Sword and the cursor becomes a blade — click or drag across a noob and it takes the arm or leg clean off for cash, with a bonus when all four are gone. Pick Grab to drag one around by whatever you clicked, then slam it into the floor or a wall — hard landings hurt and pay out, and a really heavy one rips a limb off. They haul themselves back up between hits — hips under them first, then the trunk, then the head — so there is always something standing to swing at. Once two limbs are off they stop smiling about it. Go for the head or cut them clean through the torso for the big money — either one finishes them. The camera sits still and the room is a plain box, so you can swing from anywhere on the screen and sweep straight through them. New noob drops another one in.

Land on the ground to clear the level and unlock the next tower. Stop on a ledge halfway and the drop does not count, so you take that level again.

Every level you clear makes the next one harder: the drop gets longer every single time, the ledges pack closer together, more of them are bouncers that fling you back up, and the crate you launch from gets smaller. Everything pays more to make up for it.

• Concrete deck — $6 a smack. The safe money.
• Brick ledge — $10. Sticks out further than it looks.
• Steel girder — $14. Long, thin, spins you beautifully.
• Bouncer — $18 and it fires you back up for another chain.
• Glass pane — $22. Barely slows you down.
• Gold brick — $45. The jackpot. Steer for these.
• Hazard stud — $11. Hundreds of them bolted through the shaft. Too small to land on, so they just keep your chain alive.
• Blade — $32. Proper swords — blade, crossguard, grip and pommel — ringed three abreast at fourteen heights on the first tower and more on every one after. Clip one at any speed and it cuts the arm or leg right where the edge crossed it, red in the middle. Both halves keep falling, and the stump you are left with still hits things.
• Glass pane shatters if you hit it hard enough, and the shards stick to you.
• Land hard enough and an arm or leg comes clean off with an "oof". It keeps tumbling on its own. Limbs, blood, shards and scars all switch off in Settings.
• Corner scaffolds — the four corners of the room are packed out too, so a wild launch still has plenty to smack on the way down.
• Walls and roof — $12. The whole level is a sealed room, so there is no flying out of it. The walls are springy and throw you back at the tower.

Keys: W A S D walk · Space hold then release to leap · R respawn · drag the screen to swing the camera. On a tablet, press anywhere in the left of the screen for a thumbstick and drag the right to look.