RayForce

About

RayForce is a fast-paced top-down shooter where you pilot a sleek starfighter through seven levels of escalating chaos. Blast through planetary atmospheres, rugged terrains, and large battlefields while fending off waves of enemies and massive end-level bosses. The game supports single-player runs or co-op play with a friend via split-screen, letting you share the cockpit as you unleash missiles and power-ups. Its straightforward controls and frantic action make it easy to pick up but tough to master. The game’s hook lies in its over-the-top sci-fi conflict: a rogue AI transformed Earth into a living fortress and now hunts humanity’s last colonies. While the story is told through brief text dumps, the real draw is the gameplay. With roots in 1994 arcade cabinets, RayForce has aged into a cult classic, praised by retro gaming circles for its tight mechanics and replayability. Community forums highlight its cooperative mode as a standout, with many players revisiting it for nostalgic boss battles and chaotic teamwork.

Storyline

In the distant future, human governments, across the planet Earth, construct a massive supercomputer, named "Con-Human". The purpose of this computer is to govern the planet's environmental systems, verifying proper nutrients and care is provided to ensure the culture of humans and animal alike. However, disaster strikes when, after a cloned human's mind is linked with the system, Con-Human becomes sentient and insane. It begins to induce calamities across the planet, constructing corrupt clones of existing organisms, destroying its human masters and exterminating the nature it was intended to protect, apparently intending to replace everything with what Con-Human considers improved versions of themselves. After prolonged war, Con-Human has succeeded in exterminating 99.8% of humankind, with the remnants fleeing to space colonies. Meanwhile, Con-Human remakes the very interior of Earth. As a result, Earth, as humanity knew it, has utterly ceased to exist, transformed into a planet-sized mobile fortress that is in fact Con-Human's body. Con-Human intends to use the transformed Earth to seek out and destroy the colonies, erasing all remaining traces of old life from the universe and leaving only the new life that it personally created. Now, taking the full-scale offensive, mankind develops powerful ships, one of them the RVA-818 X-LAY starfighter, to fight the oppressive machine by destroying the now-infected Earth entirely.