Arcade Whale
Shell Shockers is the shooter with the eggs. Blue Wizard Digital put it out in 2017: a first-person shooter that loads in a browser tab, where every player is an egg with a gun and the shell cracks a little more with every hit. It has free-for-all and team matches, a handful of weapon classes from a rifle to a shotgun to a sniper, and it plays fine on a school laptop, which is a big part of why so many people know it.
When people look for games like Shell Shockers, they usually want one of three things: another shooter they can play online without installing anything, something that does not take itself too seriously, or a place to get better at aiming. This page has our own games for each. There are no eggs in any of them, none of them is the official Shell Shockers, and all of them open in a browser tab.
First, the number that decides most fights in a shooter like this, and that most players never look up.
Try it: how many shots does it take?
Pick a gun from Last Gun, the first game below, choose where you aim and how far away the rival is, then fire. Everyone starts with 100 health.
Shots to drop a rival
Pick a gun and press Fire.
These are Last Gun's numbers. Damage per round: Pistol 38, SMG 15, Shotgun 15 per pellet with nine pellets, Sniper 110, DMR 44, LMG 19, Rifle 21, Magnum 64, Burst Rifle 26, .50 Cal 400. A headshot doubles it. The Shotgun loses damage from 7 m and is down to 18% past 19 m. The demo assumes every shot lands and the trigger is pressed as fast as the gun allows, so real fights take longer. A rival who goes down is back 1.7 seconds later.
Two things stand out. The fastest kill is not always the gun with the biggest number: a Burst Rifle that lands two rounds on the head drops a rival in 0.075 seconds, while the .50 Cal, the strongest gun on the rack, needs half a second to chamber its one round first. And aim changes more than the gun does. The Rifle needs five body hits and three to the head, the SMG seven and four. In a fight where both players see each other at the same moment, the one who aims a little higher usually walks away.
Shell Shockers works on the same idea, with a cracked shell instead of a health bar. Here are the games to take it to.
1. Last Gun: the online shooter
Last Gun is the closest thing we make to Shell Shockers: a first-person shooter in a browser tab, short rounds, real players, and a match you can join without an account. It has two modes on the menu.
In this 35-second clip a team deathmatch in a sunny old town goes from a double kill to a MEGA KILL. First squad to 75 wins.
Gun Game is the online one. Pick a table of 1v1, 1v3, eight or sixteen players and press Find a match, and a short lobby counts you in. There is no code to type and no invite to send. Twelve guns hang on a rack over the arena, everybody starts with the first one, and every kill hands you the next: Pistol, SMG, Shotgun, Sniper, DMR, LMG, Launcher, Rifle, Magnum, Burst Rifle, Rocket and finally the .50 Cal. The first fighter to get a kill with the .50 Cal wins. You never choose a weapon, so every gun is a new problem. The Shotgun pushes you close, the Sniper wants you far back and still, and the LMG’s 80-round belt takes three seconds to reload. A bar over every head shows how far up the rack each fighter is, so you always know who is one kill from ending it.
Team Deathmatch is the other mode, two squads of five against squads from the house. You pick one loadout gun for the match, every kill is a point for your squad, and the first squad to 75 wins, or the one ahead when the six-minute clock runs out. You also carry a grenade each life. Kills feed a career: player levels open more loadout guns, and each gun levels on its own and picks up an extended magazine, a grip and a faster reload.
Three military maps rotate: a desert outpost, a harbour of containers and cranes, and an old town plaza for the big tables. It plays on a phone with a stick to walk, a drag to look and a separate fire button. Chips from each kill buy gun colours, which change the look and nothing else, so the closest thing to Shell Shockers’ hat shop here is a gold rifle.
2. Cube Siege 3D: the cartoony one
Part of the fun of Shell Shockers is that it looks like a toy. Cube Siege 3D has that feel in blocky form. You stand in a walled courtyard of voxel grass, stone and trees, and waves of blocky mobs come over the walls at you. It is first-person, with a rifle to start, and you play it alone.
In this 15-second clip every hit knocks blocks off a big golem while the green ones walk in to explode.
What keeps it from being a shooting gallery is that every mob has to be handled a different way. The slow ones shamble straight at you. A fast one runs in and explodes, so you shoot it before it arrives. Skeletons shoot back from range, golems take eight rifle rounds to drop, spiders leap across the gaps you thought were safe, and from wave 12 phantoms fly over your cover. Every fifth wave a boss walks in, and every tenth it is the Necromancer, who raises the dead around him.
Between waves you get 30 seconds in a shop to spend what the mobs dropped: more damage, more armour, a faster reload, or the shotgun and the sniper, which pierces three mobs in a line. Headshots do 2.5 times damage, and later waves bring rules that make aim matter even more. Elite waves are armoured, so only headshots hurt them at all, Blackout waves are fought in the dark, and Frenzy speeds everything up.
3. Marksman: to get better at aiming
Most people who play Shell Shockers a lot end up wanting a better aim. Marksman is a firing range with nothing else in the way. Each course lasts one minute: steel plates rise across the range, you put rounds through them, and your score has to beat the course’s pass line to open the next one.
There is no moving and no cover, only the plates. A hit near the middle pays more than one on the edge, and white plates are no-shoots that cost you 250 points and your streak. Later courses bring plates that slide, plates that flip, and a rack of five small plates that have to fall in order. Every four courses passed earns a rank, from Recruit to Master. Ten minutes on the range before a match is a good way to warm up your hand.
4. Blackout: a duel in the dark
Blackout is a different kind of shooter: top-down instead of first-person, and played in the dark. You carry a flashlight, and you only see a guard where your beam reaches. The beam also gives you away, so every time you look you are also being seen.
In this 37-second clip guards show up only where the flashlight lands, and in a vault mission the alarm sends every guard on the floor your way.
The main game is a run of stealth missions across six sectors. The part for Shell Shockers players is Live Duel in the top bar: two to four players in the same dark arena, and the first to five kills wins. It is all about who switches their light on first.
How they compare
| Game | What you play | Online | Round length | Closest to Shell Shockers because |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last Gun | First-person gun game and team deathmatch | Gun Game, 1v1 to 16 players | Until someone wins with the last gun, or 75 kills | Quick online FPS matches in a browser |
| Cube Siege 3D | Blocky first-person wave shooter | No, solo | A run of waves until you fall | A cartoony first-person shooter |
| Marksman | Firing range | No, solo | One minute per course | Aim practice for any shooter |
| Blackout | Top-down shooter in the dark | Live Duel, 2 to 4 players | First to five kills | A quick fight against real players |
Tips for browser shooters
- Keep your crosshair at head height. Most players aim at the chest and drag up. If the crosshair already sits where heads will appear around a corner, the first shot is the doubled one.
- Go around the edge, not across the middle. The open lanes beside a central platform are where everyone is looking. Moving from crate to crate around the outside takes longer and keeps you alive.
- Stop sprinting before the corner. In Last Gun you cannot fire while you sprint; the gun comes up a moment after you let go. Walk the last few steps into a fight.
- Reload behind cover. A reload is the longest you go without shooting. The LMG takes three seconds, the .50 Cal has to be reloaded after every shot.
- Trade before you go down. In Gun Game, dying without a kill since your last spawn costs you a rung from the fourth gun up. One kill first and you keep your place.
- Use the shotgun like a shotgun. Close the distance first. Past 19 metres every pellet does less than a fifth of its damage, which is the slider in the demo above.
More shooters are on the Shooting page, and Multiplayer has every game you can play against real people. If what you liked about Shell Shockers was the quick, drop-in rounds, our guide to games like Smash Karts has more of those, and if you play at school, our list of games for a Chromebook has picks that run well on a school laptop.
