A free beat-em-up down an elevated railway, one station at a time. Plays in your browser, on a keyboard, a mouse or a phone.

The Iron Road runs over a neon city, and every station on it has a gang waiting on the platform. Fight down the line to the TERMINUS and THE CONDUCTOR. Between stations you draft the moves your combo is made of, and where you set each one decides what it can do.

Your combo is a deck you build

Your chain has six slots: STRIKE 1, STRIKE 2, STRIKE 3, FINISHER, THROW and DASH HIT. Clear a station and you draft one of three links (GUARD BREAK, BRACE, LAUNCHER, SWEEP, RUSH, ARC, SIPHON, STATIC, ECHO, HEAVY, SHATTER, RICOCHET) and set it in a slot. The slot matters as much as the link: a WARDEN's block stops your chain dead, so GUARD BREAK on the FINISHER rarely gets there, while on STRIKE 1 it opens him up. The route map shows who waits at the next station before you choose, and one of the three links on offer always answers them.

The line

  • Seven stations, from CANAL STREET to the TERMINUS, with one new kind of enemy joining at each: THUG, RUNNER, WARDEN, HACKER, BRUISER, AGENT, then THE CONDUCTOR, a boss in three phases.
  • A red ! is a swing on its way: hit first, or DASH straight through it.
  • Mashing does not work. Three quick hits that are not a finisher and an enemy gets GRIT and swings back. Finish the chain, or grab and throw the body into the gang.
  • An unbroken chain fills HEAT. Spend a full meter on RAIL SPIKE, which hits the whole street.
  • At most two of the gang swing at you at once, so a crowd is a puzzle you read, not a wall.

You never lose your progress

The ride saves at the start of every station. A fall puts you back at the start of that station with your whole chain as it was. CONTINUE on the title picks the ride up after a reload. The ending tells you how you rode the line.

Controls

  • Arrows or WASD to walk the street and across it
  • J or Z: STRIKE (chains into STRIKE 2, STRIKE 3, FINISHER)
  • K or X: GRAB a dazed enemy, press again to THROW
  • L, C or Shift: DASH (straight through a swing)
  • Space or E: RAIL SPIKE when HEAT is full
  • Esc or P: pause. M: sound on or off

Every key is also a button on screen. On a phone held upright the game switches to a tall layout with an on-screen pad; on a wide screen the pad appears the first time you touch or click during a fight. The whole line is about five minutes of fighting for a player who never falls; most rides take longer.

Credits and AI disclosure

Made by Core Systems Asset Factory with AI assistance. Code: AI-assisted. Graphics: the fighters come from our own AI-generated pixel art pack Neonward 01 and the hit effects from our Emberwrit 01 pack (both made with PixelLab); the city, the viaduct and every menu are drawn by the game's own code; the cover illustration was made with an image model. Text: AI-assisted. Sound and music: synthesised by the game's own code and rendered to the audio files it plays, with no samples and no AI audio. Type: Bowlby One SC and IBM Plex Sans Condensed, both under the SIL Open Font License.

Paid, from the same studio

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More information

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