Six Stars

Six Stars is a free browser driving game about being wanted. There is no mission list: you get a car, a sun-bleached city of nine avenues by nine under a sky that keeps moving from afternoon down into blue hour, a wanted meter across the top of the screen with six stars in it, and a GPS that draws the road to whatever matters right now - the nearest cash, the job you took, or the parking deck that hides you once the helicopter is up. Everything you do either fills that meter or empties it, and the meter is the score. It runs in any browser on a phone or a desktop with nothing to install and no account.

The loop is a single trade you keep making. Green cash markers stand on the streets; every one you take pays, and every one you take also lifts your wanted level and quietly puts a patrol on the radio. Your payout at the end is not the cash you picked up - it is that cash multiplied by the highest star you ever reached while carrying it. So the money is never the question. The question is how long you are willing to stay hot. And every time you bank, the card offers one edge for the next run - pick INSURANCE, CLEAN PLATES or FAT STACKS with a single tap, and it lasts until you bank again.

Getting the money out is its own act. The wanted meter does not drain because you drove somewhere quiet for a while; it drains because you decided to stop. Kill your headlights, sit still, be somewhere nobody can see you, and the meter starts falling fast - and when it reaches zero, the run banks and pays. Sitting in a quiet side street with four stars burning down and a siren getting louder is the tensest thing in the game, and it is also the only way to get paid.

The six stars are six different police forces, not six numbers. One star is a patrol car on your tail. Two puts roadblocks across the avenues. Three drops spike strips, and a flat tyre changes how the car answers the wheel for the rest of the run. Four calls in the helicopter, and its searchlight does not blink - the covered parking deck is the only roof in the city that hides you from it. Five is when they stop chasing and start ramming your back quarter. Six locks the city down and halves how fast you can cool off. The star only changes who comes and how many - being taken is the same at every level: stop moving with a patrol alongside and a SURROUNDED meter starts filling, faster the more cars are around you, and driving off is the only thing that empties it. On foot it is not the car that takes you but the officer who gets out of it: while a star is showing, a patrol that pulls up beside you puts a uniform on the pavement, and he runs faster than you walk and slower than you sprint, so the meter starts the moment he reaches you. Being taken does not end the run: they keep the car and let you out on foot somewhere else in the city, with the heat cleared and a little over half of what you were carrying gone.

You do not have to stay behind the wheel. Come to a stop, press E, and you step out of the driver’s door onto the street - and the woman who rides with you gets out of the other side and follows you, holding a slot at your shoulder, walking when you walk and running when you run. On foot the game becomes a normal third-person game: the mouse looks, W A S D move you relative to the camera rather than turning you on the spot, your character turns to face wherever he is going, and Space is a sprint on top of an ordinary run. Stepping out is not a way to hide, either: while you are wanted the patrol cars that catch up stop beside you and an officer gets out and comes after you on foot, so the sprint is what buys you the seconds to reach another car. You can also stand and fight. J, or a click once the mouse is captured, throws a three-hit string - right hand, left hand, then a kick that puts people on the ground - and you choose whether to finish it, because the kick hits hardest and leaves you open longest. Most people on the pavement run when you swing at them, but some swing back, and every punch you land raises your wanted level. Hit an officer and the ones around you stop just reaching for you and start punching back for a while; drop one with the kick and he is out of the SURROUNDED count until he gets up. On foot you have a health bar under the speedometer that refills if you stay out of trouble for a few seconds. Lose it with no stars showing and you wake up on the pavement with a fifth of your cash gone; lose it while wanted and it is an ordinary bust. If you would rather not touch the keyboard at all, holding the mouse button walks you forward in whatever direction you are looking. Any car will do - a parked one, a car waiting at a red light, or a car still moving: press E near moving traffic and the driver pulls over for you, then walk to the door and get in. Neither move is instant: you actually climb out of the door and stand up, and going back in you walk to the door first - around the back of the car if you are standing on the wrong side - so with a patrol alongside, deciding to swap cars costs you a second you can be caught in. What you inherit from a car you take is its shape, not its numbers, and the streets are stocked with five of them - saloon, coupe, pickup, SUV and van - so the car you see in the mirror changes even when the handling does not.

You are not helpless in any of it. The handbrake swings the car around a corner faster than the grip allows, a hard shunt at speed wrecks a patrol car outright - it goes up in a fireball, flips onto its roof and pays a TAKEDOWN bonus into the cash you are carrying, bigger the more stars you have - and any car in the city can be jacked, parked or moving - new plates take a star off you, at the cost of dropping back to ordinary street-car handling. You start in a long-nosed V8 grand tourer with a big punch and forgiving grip, and three more cars unlock as your bank grows. The first time you play, the game drops you straight into the city and nothing moves - not the traffic, not the police, not the clock - until you touch the controls; your first bank then takes you to the garage, and after that the game opens there with your last car picked and one DRIVE button to press. You can also reach the garage from the Garage button under the minimap while you are carrying no cash and no stars, from the pause menu, or straight from the bank screen: the muscle car trades grip for an even higher top end, the van is heavy enough to shove roadblocks out of the way, and the electric Ghost cools off twice as fast when you lie low. The pavements are not scenery either - the crowds are solid, and clipping someone at speed knocks them down and puts another mark on your wanted meter.

The city keeps its own clock. Around four minutes in the radio picks you up; checkpoints go up at nine; air support arrives at thirteen; a blackout takes a whole district dark at seventeen, which is bad for seeing and excellent for hiding. At twenty-three a news chopper starts filming and your payout goes up by half while it is overhead. At twenty-six the bridges go up. Your star ceiling also rises with time in the run and with the money you have banked, so the sixth star is something you earn access to, not something the game hands you.

The city has an edge, and it is worth driving to. North of the last avenue the grid gives way to a sand strip - sea wall, parasols, volleyball nets, palms - and a causeway runs out from the middle of it, two pylons and a line of lamps, to a small rock island with a lighthouse on it. It is the only place in the game you can see from the far end of the boulevard and decide to go to. It is not a safe room either: patrol cars appear on the deck behind you and follow you all the way out, so the most cinematic stretch of road is also the one with nowhere left to turn. And in the city itself the police do not only trail you - once you are moving fast at two stars or more, a car comes in sideways out of the cross street just before the junction you are heading for, and you have to decide: brake, or thread past it.

Controls are as short as they can be, and they change with what you are doing. In the car W and S drive, A and D steer, Space is the handbrake, L is your lights, R flips the radio between three stations, holding Tab shows the key list, and E steps you out - or, alongside a parked car, straight into it. On foot the game switches to a normal third-person scheme: the mouse looks around, W A S D move you relative to the camera instead of turning you on the spot, your character faces wherever he is running, Space is a sprint on top of an ordinary run, J (or a click once the mouse is captured) punches, and E takes any car you are standing next to - or flags down one that is still driving. You can also drop the keyboard: in the car hold the mouse button and drag to steer, and on foot just hold it to walk forward wherever you are looking. On a phone two steering pads under your left thumb turn the car, the gas and reverse pedals under your right thumb drive it, dragging the right half of the screen looks around, and DRIFT, LIGHTS and JACK sit above the pedals - step out and the pads become a stick and the gas pedal becomes a PUNCH button, because on foot the stick is the walk - push that stick all the way to its edge and you sprint, and the LOOK pad beside the pedals glances over your shoulder. On a keyboard C is that same look back and H drops the whole thing into a cinematic chase camera that cuts between fixed street angles and clears the HUD away. Your bank, your best payout and your unlocked cars are stored on your own device, so closing the tab costs you nothing. If you like open-city driving and police chases, this is a short, honest version of that with the paperwork removed.

The city also hands you work, and you never have to take it. An amber diamond turns up on the minimap every so often; drive into it and the contract is yours, and from then on the route is drawn on the road in front of you - blue chevrons to the drop, a marker at the screen edge when it is out of view, and the job chip naming the next turn. A COURIER run is a package across town against a clock. A STORE HIT parks you outside a shop and asks you to get out and hold the door while the till empties - the money is good and the wanted meter jumps the moment it pays, so you take that job knowing what you are buying. A REPO marks one specific parked car somewhere in the grid and wants that exact car, which means walking up to it, taking it and driving it back. Every job pays on top of the cash markers, pays extra if the car comes back without a scratch, and pays more again if you take the next one straight away instead of cooling off. Ignore the diamond and it expires quietly; another one comes along.

The city is not scenery. The pavements carry real crowds - people walk in pairs, wait on corners, cross when there is a gap, and stop and turn to watch you when you step out of the car or drive past with a star on you. Traffic queues at the lights instead of piling into itself. And the police radio under the minimap is not on a timer: it speaks when something actually happens. It calls the star you just earned, the unit that has eyes on you, the moment they lose you again, a wrecked patrol car, a pedestrian you clipped, or the car you just took - and every line names the district it happened in. When the radio goes quiet, you got away.