The traffic stopped. Then it got up.
Play Snarlup — free, in your browser
Snarlup is a top-down survival shooter set in one city intersection on the day everything stopped. The jam never cleared: cars sit nose-to-tail in both lanes, doors open, engines cold. You are on foot in the middle of it with a pistol and a street full of things walking in from every road mouth. Move with one hand and aim with the other, put a car between you and a crowd, and clear the wave. Every wave you finish buys one upgrade and the next wave is worse. The traffic is your cover and your enemy both — shoot a car enough and it catches, burns, and goes up, taking whatever is near it, which is a card you can only play once per car. Every fifth wave sends a boss that pulls the traffic out of the road and throws it at you.
You start in the middle of the junction with a pistol and twelve rounds. Zombies walk in from all four road mouths, so there is no safe direction — only a direction that is clear right now.
Moving and aiming are separate. Walking backwards while firing into a crowd is the whole game, and standing still to shoot is how runs end.
The traffic is cover. Zombies path around cars the same way you do, so putting a car between you and a crowd genuinely breaks their approach and buys you a reload.
Shooting a car sets it alight. It burns for a couple of seconds, hurting anything close, then explodes — and the blast does not care whose side you are on. Afterwards it is a wreck: still solid, no longer useful as a weapon.
Clear a wave and you are offered three upgrades. Take one — the street waits, so read them properly.
Every fifth wave is a boss. The Pileup is slow, enormous, and the only thing in the game that changes the street: it tears cars out of the road and throws them at you. Its escort is deliberately thin so you can actually see it coming.
The boss telegraphs. A closing orange ring means it is winding up — move, because whatever it is holding is about to arrive near where you are standing. Straight after a throw it is rooted and EXPOSED, ringed in yellow, and takes more than double damage. That window is the fight.
Snarlup is a free browser-based top-down survival shooter set in a single city intersection after everything stopped. The traffic jam never cleared, and the things walking between the cars used to be in them. You fight endless waves on foot, using the stalled traffic as cover, and pick one upgrade after each wave you clear.
Yes. Snarlup runs in your browser with no download, no signup and no paywall.
Movement and aim are independent, which is the whole point of the genre. WASD or the arrow keys move your body, the mouse points your gun, and holding the left button fires. That lets you walk backwards while shooting into a crowd — the single most useful thing you can learn in this game.
No. The traffic is cover, not transport. Cars block you and the zombies alike, so putting one between yourself and a crowd genuinely breaks their approach — and shooting a car enough sets it alight, after which it burns, explodes, and leaves a wreck that is still solid but no longer useful as a weapon.
Only when you die. The waves are endless and get steadily harder — runners arrive on wave three, brutes on wave six — so a run is a score, not a finish line. Clearing a wave is worth more than the kills in it, so pushing deeper always beats farming.
Every cleared wave offers three choices from a pool: new weapons (shotgun, SMG, rifle), or improvements to fire rate, damage, reload speed, magazine size, movement speed and maximum health. Repeatable upgrades stack, so a long run turns a pistol into something quite unlike a pistol.
Yes — every fifth wave. The Pileup is slow, enormous, and the only thing in the game that changes the street: it pulls cars out of the road and throws them at you, destroying them, so your cover thins out the longer the fight runs. It telegraphs every throw with a closing orange ring, and straight afterwards it is rooted and exposed and takes more than double damage. That window is where the fight is won — running the whole time will not get through its health. Boss waves come with a deliberately thin escort so you can see it coming.
Yes, and none of it is a sound file — every gunshot, impact and explosion is synthesised in the browser at the moment it happens, so the game stays small and loads instantly. Each weapon has its own voice rather than the same shot at a different volume: the shotgun is a low broadband thump, the SMG a dry tick, the rifle a hard crack. Sounds are positioned too, so a car going up behind you is quieter and off to one side. A low drone holds for as long as a boss is alive, and its release is how you know the fight is over. There is a SOUND ON / SOUND OFF button and it remembers your choice.
Yes. A thumb stick on the left moves you, and dragging anywhere on the right half of the screen aims and fires at the same time. Upgrade cards between waves are tapped.
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