You Monster! — Play Free Online

You Monster! is a browser action game from the Poki catalogue, filed under action and shooting. You steer a character around the screen with the keyboard and use the mouse to aim, so it plays closer to a top-down shooter than to a one-button jumper. It loads in a tab with nothing to install, which makes it easy to open between longer sessions.

If you came to this site for Doodle Jump, the connection is the pace. Doodle Jump is about staying alive one more screen; this is a game of staying on your feet while you point and fire, and sessions are short enough to restart on the spot when a run goes wrong. It asks for more mouse work than the jumpers around it, which is a nice change if your hands are tired of tilting left and right.

How to play

Move with the arrow keys or WASD, and use the mouse to aim and to pick options in the menus. On a phone or tablet you tap and swipe instead. The page does not describe a long tutorial, so treat the first attempt as a test run: find out how fast your character moves, how far your aim has to travel, and what happens when you get hit.

Because movement and aiming sit on different hands, the usual habit is to keep your left hand on the movement keys and leave the right hand on the mouse the whole time. Switching between WASD and the arrow keys mid-run only costs you reaction time, so pick one set and stay on it.

Tips

1. Spend the first run learning the controls rather than chasing a score; a clean restart costs almost nothing.
2. Keep moving while you aim. Standing still to line up a shot is when most players take damage in games of this type.
3. Use fullscreen from the button under the game if the targets look small, as it gives you more room to aim.
4. If the game stalls, reload the page and it starts fresh.

Similar games on Doodle Jump

For something more vertical, Doodle Trump and Bird Jumper keep the climbing idea of the headline game, and Helix Jump is a one-hand drop-through-the-tower arcade game. If you want another keyboard game with real obstacles, Ovo 2 is a precision platformer, and Fireboy and Watergirl is a puzzle-platformer built for two players on one keyboard. Day D Tower Rush and Bloons Tower Defense 2 lean toward strategy rather than reflexes.

It suits a quick break on a desktop or laptop with a mouse best, though the touch controls mean it also opens on a phone.