Field Manual · 01

How to play Squad Surge

Run forward. Grow the squad. Read the road before the road reads you. This is the beginner-to-intermediate manual for one endless run.

Squad Surge is an endless browser shooter. Your soldiers run automatically, aim automatically, and fire automatically. Your job is to steer the formation, pick the right gate, avoid the marked danger, and spend limited tools at the moment that matters. A run is divided into 720-metre sectors. Each sector ends at a boss arena; clearing that boss gives you a choice of one perk and sends you into the next sector.

The count over your squad is real. More soldiers mean more shots and more total damage. The road also gets harder as you go: enemy health rises, horde density rises, elite enemies become possible, and bad gate choices become more common. Do not chase a pretty number for its own sake. Build a squad that can stay alive through the next trap and kill the next boss.

Goal: get farther, score higher, learn the seed

There is no final finish line. Push through sectors, defeat bosses, take one perk after each kill, and survive until the squad reaches zero. Your run score is distance × 2 + kill score + 1,500 for each boss defeated. Kills earn score and coins; bosses also add their sector-scaled coin reward. Coins persist on this browser and buy Armory upgrades for future runs.

Controls

Do not fight the steering. A drag moves the target position directly; keys and a stick hold a continuous left or right steer. The formation widens as the squad grows, so leave extra room before a narrow hazard. Firing needs no button. Keep the squad lined up with enemies, gold targets, crates, cages, barricades, and turrets when nothing closer steals the aim.

The squad and its limits

You start with four soldiers plus any Recruits levels from the Armory. The hard squad cap is 400. Only up to 150 soldiers are individually drawn, but every soldier in the shown count contributes to firepower and losses are scaled to that real count. Fallen soldiers are tracked separately: healing gates and medkits can bring them back. A loss from a bad gate, trap, or enemy becomes fallen; a gain can restore the firing line.

Read the gates

Blue means the lane helps: it can add soldiers, multiply squad size, increase fire rate, or sometimes revive fallen soldiers. Red means damage to the plan: subtract soldiers, divide the squad, reduce fire rate, or lower weapon tier. Gold marks weapon progress and shootable gates. Purple is a gamble: a 50% chance to triple the squad and a 50% chance to halve it, rounded up.

A row always has at least one clearly helpful option. Good does not always mean best. Compare what the gate does to your current count and weapon. Multiplication is usually strongest when the squad is already large. A weapon tier can be better before a boss or when your formation is thin. A revive gate only helps if you have fallen soldiers and room under the 400 cap.

Weapons: tiers and role

Weapon gates raise or lower one tier, clamped between I and VII. Supply crates can also grant a tier; at maximum tier, a weapon crate becomes 30 coins instead. Heavy Rifle starts piercing. Shotgun wins when its four pellets overlap a close crowd. Ion Rifle clears lines. Do not judge a weapon only by one damage number: rate, pellets, and pierce change how it clears a formation.

Gold targets and two active abilities

A gold shootable gate starts as a small soldier gain. Keep it in front of your guns before crossing it. Damage raises its displayed value one point at a time, up to a sector-dependent cap. Your bullets stop on the gate while they improve it, so committing to it can cost horde damage. Aim at a shootable gate when the road is quiet; abandon it when an elite, a barricade, or a dangerous pack needs immediate fire.

Every run starts with one grenade and one medkit, plus one of each per Munitions Armory level. A grenade automatically targets the boss if one is active, otherwise the densest nearby enemy cluster. Its base blast damage is 700 before threat scaling; use it to thin a pile, delete a dangerous target area, or hit a boss while your guns are busy. It does not hurt your squad.

A medkit only works when soldiers have fallen. It revives the smaller of all fallen soldiers or 35% of them, with a floor of six. That makes it better after a real loss than after one casualty. Do not press it at zero fallen: the game tells you there is nobody to revive and preserves the medkit.

Sectors, hazards, and bosses

The themes repeat in this order: Downtown Dusk, Industrial Docks, Quarantine Zone, Burning Highway, and Cemetery Fog. Sector 1 teaches steering, gates, automatic fire, a gold gate, spikes, a weapon tier, and rooftop Leapers. Later sectors add ambushes, barricades, turrets, supply crates, rescue cages, elites, burrowers, and deeper trap combinations. The core road always provides a safe line or a safe timing window. Find it before you arrive.

Each sector ends in an arena. Bosses use one of four bodies—Brute King, Blister Mother, Riot Warden, or Abomination—then receive a randomized attack set and modifiers. Every attack paints its danger on the ground first. Leave circles, leave rectangles, and take the gap in a sweep. At 66% and 33% health the boss changes phase, calls adds, and cannot be rushed straight through the breakpoint before its minimum phase time has elapsed.

Perks: take one after every boss

After a boss, choose one of three cards from perks you have not maxed. Common perks appear more often than rare perks, and rare more often than epic perks. Reliable early picks are Piercing Rounds, Hollow Points, and Overclock: all stack and raise general killing power. Field Medic stabilizes a battered run. Grenadier gives automatic pressure relief. Blast Shield is a one-per-sector safety net; take it before a sector you expect to enter thin.

Perks are not a shop and there is no reroll. Read the current weakness. Low squad count with fallen soldiers favors Field Medic. A dense gun line favors Pierce, Ricochet, Incendiary, or Chain Lightning. A coin-focused run wants Magnet early because it doubles coin pickups for the rest of that run. The detailed perk and Armory table is in Perks & Armory.

Coins, the Armory, and the Daily Run

Enemies drop coins when killed. Elite kills pay four times the archetype coin value. Barricades give 12 coins when destroyed, turrets give 10, coin crates pay 25 plus 15 per current sector index, and a boss awards 40 coins in the first sector plus 35 more for every later sector. Scavenger adds 10% earned coins per Armory level; Magnet doubles coin pickups during that run. Coins buy permanent upgrades only. Nothing is sold for money.

Daily Run uses a seed made from the current UTC date, so its layout is repeatable for that day. It is a good practice mode: learn where a gate row, trap, or boss setup appeared, then make a cleaner attempt. The game records a local Daily best. It is not an online leaderboard or an account system.

Settings and accessibility

Settings include music and effects volume, mute, Low/Medium/High visual quality, screen shake, damage numbers, and reduced motion. Use Low quality first if the browser is struggling. Turn off screen shake or enable reduced motion if impacts and camera effects are uncomfortable. The Blood & gore option defaults to off; with it off, enemies burst into dark ichor without flesh debris. You can change that in Settings.

Progress—coins, Armory levels, records, Daily best, and settings—is stored in this browser’s localStorage on this device. There is no account. Clearing browser storage, using private browsing, or changing browser/device can remove or isolate that progress.