Pokémon Survivor Arena

How to play

Survivor Arena is an auto-battler. You never press an attack button. Your partner carries between one and six moves, each with its own cooldown, and every move fires on its own the moment it is ready. Your only jobs are to move and to choose upgrades, which sounds simple until forty Pokémon are walking at you from every direction.

Movement is the whole game. On a keyboard use W A S D or the arrow keys; on a phone or tablet drag the joystick in the bottom-left corner of the arena. Your partner's Speed base stat sets its real movement speed in pixels per second, so a Pikachu genuinely outruns a Bulbasaur and a slow tank has to plan its escape earlier. Enemies spawn in a ring outside the visible arena and walk straight at you, so the damage you take is almost always damage you allowed by standing still.

When an enemy faints it drops XP orbs. Orbs drift toward you inside your pickup radius, and a Magnet upgrade widens that radius. Collect enough XP and the run stops dead for a level-up: three upgrade cards appear and you pick one. Cards include learning a whole new move from a type you do not have yet, adding a projectile to every shot, widening the area of your attacks, shortening cooldowns, raising raw damage, adding max HP, and pulling in orbs from further away. Stacks are capped per card, so the pool keeps refreshing as a run goes long.

Damage is not a single number. Every projectile carries a type, and every enemy carries its real defensive typing, so the hit runs through the same eighteen-type chart the rest of this site uses. A Water move against a Fire/Ground enemy lands for double damage and shows a green 2x; the same move against another Water type shows 0.5x and barely scratches; and a Normal move against a Ghost shows 0x and does nothing at all. Watching those numbers is how you learn which of your moves is currently worthless and which one is carrying the run.

Waves advance on a timer. Enemy HP scales with the wave — every wave adds thirty-five percent to the base — so the same Caterpie you one-shot in wave one becomes a wall by wave nine. Every fifth wave a legendary from the roster arrives as a boss with a health bar across the top of the arena and roughly thirty times the health of ordinary trash. Bosses do not leave; you have to kill them, or out-walk them until your damage catches up.

Runs end when your HP reaches zero. The summary shows time survived, wave, level, knockouts and your partner, plus a share line that contains the run's seed. Because spawning, upgrade offers, critical hits and boss selection all come from that one seeded stream, the same seed replays the identical run — hand it to a friend and you are racing the same arena.

What the numbers mean

• HP — your partner's HP base stat, boosted; you heal only through upgrades.
• XP — orbs collected; the bar fills to the next level-up.
• Wave — every 20 seconds. Enemy HP scales with it; a boss lands every fifth wave.
• KOs — enemies defeated this run; each one drops orbs.
• Swarm — live enemies on the field, capped at 120 at once.