The sky has two floors. Only one of them can kill you at a time.
A five-stage vertical bullet hell in the Cave lineage, dressed as a 1944 naval recognition manual. The hook is ALTITUDE: your plane occupies either the HIGH band or the LOW band, and every enemy bullet belongs to one of them. Amber tracer only exists up high. Steel flak only skims the water. Red flak bursts fill both and will always kill you. Hold DIVE to drop, release to climb — and remember that the half-second of the switch itself is the most dangerous half-second in the game. A full clear runs about fifteen minutes: five stages, five midbosses, five capital-ship bosses with named spell cards. You start with three lives and three continues, but a continue zeroes your score, so the only score that really counts is a one-credit clear.
The enemy is fictional on purpose. The Scarlet Fleet is a maritime power with a crimson sunburst roundel, a doctrine built entirely around massed anti-air, and an unreasonable number of ships named after weather. Nothing in IRON GALE maps onto a real nation, a real navy, or a real war — the game wants the look of 1944 recognition posters, not the ledger of one.
You fly the F-9 GALE, a twin-boom interceptor with a bad reputation and a very good gunsight. Blue Squadron flies it because nobody else will: it climbs like a brick and dives like a thrown anvil, which is exactly the aircraft you want if your job is to be in two altitude bands in the same minute.
The altitude band is a readability device before it is a mechanic. Anti-aircraft fire and surface fire genuinely do occupy different volumes of air; the game just makes that legible by drawing the volume you are not in as drained, dimmed and slightly out of focus. If it looks faded, it cannot touch you. That rule never lies, which is what makes a 1CC possible.
Olive drab, white recognition stripes, two stars on the wing and a nose full of guns. Its hitbox is a 2.6-pixel dot at the centre of the cockpit pod; the whole rest of the aircraft is decoration.
The teaching boss. Twin turret salvos in the red band, a depth-charge curtain in the low band, then everything at once. If you can read which colour is which by the end of this fight, you can finish the game.
Launches fighters at you the entire fight, then walks three flight-deck lasers across the screen. The lasers are always warned; the fighters never are.
Three submarines sharing one health pool, surfacing one at a time until the last phase, when all three come up and orbit. Homing torpedoes and geysers that erupt under wherever you were standing a second ago.
A cliff face with three rotary cannons. Drops drifting mines that bloom on a timer and drills one enormous tracking beam per cycle. The only static boss in the game, and the densest.
Four phases as a battleship, then the bridge tower tears loose and flies. The last phase is the hardest thing in the game and the only one with a two-minute timer.
HIGH is the default: fast movement, machine guns, and amber tracer fire everywhere. Hold DIVE (SHIFT / Z / right-click, the DIVE pad, or a second finger) to drop to LOW: slower and more precise, heavy cannon and rockets, and a sky full of steel flak instead. The switch takes eleven frames, and during those eleven frames BOTH bands can hit you — the plane's shadow slides, the altimeter needle sweeps, and a red ring lights the dial. Never switch inside a curtain.
Your shots do full damage to targets in the same band, and only about a third in the other. Ships are LOW targets, aircraft are HIGH targets, and every capital ship is a LOW target that puts most of its AA into the HIGH band. That is the central squeeze of every boss fight: the only altitude where you can actually hurt it is the one it has filled with steel.
Every kill adds one to the SORTIE CHAIN and drops medals. Medals top the chain timer back up, so the chain survives on collection, not just kills. The multiplier steps up every eight chain and caps at ×6. Grazing pays 60 flat and never breaks anything — go and get the medals.
Three flares per life. A flare cancels every bullet within a huge radius into medals, grants about a second and a half of invulnerability, and sends the GALE into a strafing run — a wide cone of piercing tracer for the next half-second. It is a get-out AND a damage burst; using one on a boss phase transition is usually the right call, and clearing a stage without one is worth 15,000.
Every boss phase has a hard timer as well as a health bar. Survive long enough and the phase ends anyway, with a smaller payout. Nobody gets stuck; the fifteen-minute promise holds even on a bad run.
Aircraft are HIGH targets. Vessels are LOW targets. Every vessel puts AA into the HIGH band anyway.
This is the whole game in four rows.
Roughly three minutes each; a full clear is about sixteen minutes including intermissions.
| Stage | Setting | Midboss | Boss |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 — DAWN PATROL | Open ocean, 0540 | PT-Leader KAWASEMI | BOSS: DD-07 SHIRANUI |
| 2 — CARRIER LINE | Task force, 1120 | CA-3 AKATOMBO | BOSS: CV-11 AKAGANE |
| 3 — STORM FRONT | Squall line, 1640 | HERON-X RAIJIN | BOSS: WOLFPACK IRONJAW |
| 4 — BLACK REEF | Volcanic chain, 1905 | Shore Battery KAGE | BOSS: FORTRESS KUROIWA |
| 5 — IRON GALE | Fleet anchorage, 2350 | Escort Wing KUROTSUBAME | BOSS: BB-01 AMANOGAWA |
Continues reset the score to zero. The board is a 1CC board.
| Source | Value |
|---|---|
| Enemy kill | base × chain multiplier (×1 → ×6) |
| Medal | 100 × multiplier |
| Big medal (from a large kill) | 400 × multiplier |
| Graze | 60 flat |
| Bullets cancelled by a flare | 40 each |
| Boss phase clear | cancelled bullets × 60 + 4,000–25,000 |
| Stage clear | 20,000 × stage |
| No-miss stage bonus | +30,000 |
| No-flare stage bonus | +15,000 |
| Action | Keyboard / mouse | Touch |
|---|---|---|
| Move | Arrows / WASD, or move the mouse | Drag anywhere (relative, so your thumb never covers the plane) |
| Fire | Automatic | Automatic |
| Dive to LOW | Hold SHIFT / Z / right-click | Hold the DIVE pad, or a second finger |
| Flare | X / SPACE | Tap the FLARE pad |
| Pause | P / ESC | Pause tab, top right |
| Mute | M | Music tab, top right |