Floppy Bears

The bulls have had a wonderful run. They built semiconductor plants, farms, electrical grid, and even rocket ships — and are enjoying trading their stocks after the opening bell on the floor of the exchange. However the bears have taken notice and are coming to wreak havoc on the bulls' party.

They arrive by slingshot. Every bear is a real species with a desk on the trading floor and a special move named after the market: Penny, an American black bear and a permanently under-slept junior analyst, compounds into two of herself in mid-air; Chip the giant panda pulls a stock split and comes down as three faster cubs; Whale the polar bear swells to twice his weight and drops straight through concrete; and Margin the sloth bear does not so much hit things as liquidate the whole position. There are nine on the roster from the first shot, and three more who have to be earned.

The party runs 51 levels deep: from a chip fab in Silicon Valley and a grain farm in the Midwest, through a container port, a bank vault, a rocket on the pad, an offshore rig and the Fed’s cash room, to a nuclear plant, a cruise ship and finally The Big Board on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. 295 bulls are dug in behind glass, timber, concrete and steel — eight of them Big Bulls — and almost every building has something explosive parked somewhere inconvenient. Find it, hit it, and let physics file the paperwork.

How to play

• Aim — drag back from the slingshot. The dotted arc shows the flight path; the ring shows how hard you are pulling. Changed your mind? Release on the ✕, or press Escape.
• Special move — tap the screen (or press space) while a bear is in the air. Once per bear (except Moonshot, who can do it twice), and every species does something different — the roster says what.
• Look around — drag anywhere that is not the slingshot to pan across the level.
• Score — everything you break scores, bulls score a lot, every bear you do not use is worth 10,000, and a brass bell, wherever one hangs, is worth a small fortune.
• Explosives — nitrogen tanks, dynamite, pyro barrels, fertiliser, LNG and LOX — 28 kinds in all, each stencilled with what is inside. Aim at those.
• Stars — every level has three score targets. One star clears it; three means wrecking nearly everything and leaving a bear or two unused. Your best score and stars sit on each level's card and in the top bar while you play it.
• Unlocks — the first two levels are open from the start, and every level you clear opens one more, so there are always two to choose from and one stubborn building never blocks the way. The last level asks for 150 stars instead.
• Keys — space fires the special move, R restarts the level and Escape puts the bear back on the sling. The fullscreen button blows the stage up to fill the screen.

Questions