How do I aim in Ricochet?

Click or tap near the slingshot on the left side of the screen, then drag to pull back. A dotted arc preview shows your shot trajectory. Release to launch. The farther you pull, the more power — capped at 120 pixels from the pivot for precise control.

What are the three projectile types?

Standard fires a normal projectile that damages one block on contact. Explosive detonates on impact with an AOE blast dealing 2 HP to all blocks within range. Splitter splits into three when you click again in mid-flight, and each fragment deals 1 HP to the first block it meets. Use the Switch Type button to cycle between them.

How is scoring calculated?

Each target destroyed earns 500 points. Blocks broken earn 100 points each. At level end, every unused projectile earns a 200-point bonus — efficient clears score highest. Your cumulative score is submitted to the leaderboard when you complete level 15.

Does Ricochet work on mobile?

Yes — touch drag for aiming and lift to fire work on any touchscreen. The canvas scales to your screen and uses touch-action: none to prevent accidental scrolling while playing.

Play Ricochet — Free Physics Slingshot Game

Mastering the Slingshot Physics

Behind every shot in Ricochet is a small parabolic physics simulation. The slingshot pivots near the lower left of the canvas, and your drag distance maps directly to launch velocity — pull farther for more power, up to a cap of 120 pixels from the pivot. Once the projectile is airborne, gravity pulls it down at a constant acceleration while a small horizontal drag factor gradually slows it. The dotted preview draws only the first 30 frames of that flight and bleeds off horizontal speed faster than the live projectile does, so read it as a guide to your launch angle rather than as a landing marker — the real shot carries noticeably further than the dots suggest.

Blocks have different hit points that determine how many strikes they take. Glass shatters in a single hit, wood needs two, stone takes three, and iron blocks introduced from level eleven onward demand four direct hits to break. Crates marked with a plus symbol grant one extra projectile when destroyed, which is one of the most reliable ways to recover from a wasted opening shot. Use the trajectory preview to weigh whether a stack is worth a Standard shot or whether an Explosive round will collapse the structure in a single launch.

Tips and Strategies for Ricochet

Open every level by reading the layout before you grab the slingshot. Identify which targets are exposed, which are buried inside structures, and where any crates sit — a well-placed first shot that knocks down a crate effectively gives you a free extra round to spend on harder targets later. Save Explosive projectiles for dense stone or iron towers where the area-of-effect blast can damage many blocks at once, and use Splitter mid-flight by clicking again after launch when several targets are spaced out across the screen.

Count hit points instead of hoping for collapses — blocks are fixed in place and never fall when the ones beneath them break, and a standard round ends on the first block it touches for 1 HP. That makes stone and iron walls expensive to chew through one shot at a time, while an Explosive round takes 2 HP off every block within 80 pixels, so two of them will clear a tight cluster of stone or iron outright. Because every unused projectile at the end of a level grants a 200-point bonus, the most efficient route to a high leaderboard total is fewer shots, not more — even if a level looks easy, treat each launch as if it counts. Holding back one or two reserve shots also gives you a safety net when a launch goes wide or a balloon turns out to be more deeply buried than it looked.

What Makes Ricochet Different

Physics slingshot games are a well-loved genre, popularized by Angry Birds and other mobile classics where players fling characters at toppling forts. Ricochet sits in that tradition but is built from the ground up in vanilla JavaScript on an HTML5 canvas, with no external physics engine and no install required — the entire game loads and runs directly in your browser. The pixel-art aesthetic, neon projectile trails, and warm dusk skybox give it a distinct retro-arcade feel rather than a cartoon-mobile one.

The three projectile types — Standard, Explosive, and Splitter — turn each shot into a small puzzle about resource choice, since you switch between them freely with the Switch Type button rather than being forced into a fixed sequence. Fifteen handcrafted levels, a seeded daily challenge that shuffles the level order, balloon-style targets that bob gently in place, and crates that reward aggressive offense with extra ammunition all push Ricochet toward the puzzle end of the slingshot spectrum. If you have enjoyed casual arcade games or casual physics puzzles elsewhere, this is a familiar feel with its own scoring twist — free to play online with no download or signup. And if demolishing block towers ever leaves you wanting to build one instead, Stacker flips the loop into a retro tap-to-drop tower-stacking score chase.