XGalaga HDOne app, one purchase, every Apple screen.
Defend the outer rim. The 1998 wave shooter, rebuilt from the ground up as one app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch. Alien convoys sweep in along hand-authored flight paths, lock into formation, then peel off to dive at you one at a time.
It follows you across the house
Buy XGalaga HD once and it is yours on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch. Universal Purchase covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, with the Watch app embedded in the iPhone build. Touch, keyboard, game controller, Siri Remote or Digital Crown: all supported, all remappable.
And on Apple TV with the Siri Remote or a game controller: the gameplay video and every screenshot on this page were captured there.
Faithful where it counts
The wave timings, entry flight paths and formation behaviour are reproduced exactly from the 1998 original. What’s new is everything you see and hear.
Seventeen alien classes
Six hull families across four threat tiers, from teal scout drones through amber raptors and violet shardlords to the gold-crested Dreadnought and Leviathan.
Fifteen hand-authored waves
All fifteen levels of the original, looping with rising aggression. Nothing is generated at random: the routes are the routes.
Eleven power-ups
Twin, tri and spread cannons. Autoloader, ammo cells, thrusters, deflector shields, smart bombs, extra ships and bounties.
Locked 60 Hz
A fixed-step simulation that stays smooth at 120 Hz on ProMotion, so the timing is identical on every device.
Built to feel right
Camera shake, hit-stop, and slow motion when you go down. Engine trails, ion wakes, shockwaves and tumbling hull debris.
A ship that grows
Your fighter visibly upgrades as the loadout builds: new barrels, new plating, new light.
Nothing else in the box
No ads. No in-app purchases. No tracking, no accounts, no network. Buy it once, it’s yours.
Play it your way
Touch, keyboard, MFi and console controllers, Siri Remote or the Digital Crown, with every control remappable.
There is not one bitmap in this game
Not a single PNG ships in the app bundle. Every ship, bolt, power-up and explosion is rendered on your device at first launch by a purpose-built offline renderer, then cached to disk. It looks pre-rendered because it is, just on your hardware and at your display’s resolution.
Geometry
Ships are parametric vector hulls: six alien archetypes (dart, saucer, crystal, beetle, raptor, hive) crossed with wing styles, armour, claws and crests.
Relief
Each part is rasterised to an anti-aliased mask. A chamfer distance transform drives a blended bevel and dome height field, whose gradient gives per-pixel surface normals.
Material
Procedural fBm noise and brushed-metal streaks perturb the height field, so the detail is shading rather than decals.
Lighting
A fixed three-point rig of key, cool fill and back rim, with metallic Blinn-Phong plus an analytic environment probe for reflections. That last term is what makes metal read as metal.
Occlusion
Distance-field ambient occlusion, plus contact shadows cast between parts, layer to layer.
Emission
Cores and running lights bloomed with a three-radius filter, then ACES tone-mapped to sRGB.
Hold the line
Tap any shot to enlarge.
The details
- Devices
- iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV and Apple Watch
- Purchase
- $1.99, one purchase covers all five
- Category
- Games
- Business model
- No ads, no in-app purchases
- Privacy
- No tracking, no accounts, no network
- Controls
- Touch, keyboard, MFi and console controllers, Siri Remote, Digital Crown
- Frame rate
- Locked 60 Hz, smooth at 120 Hz on ProMotion
- Content
- 15 waves · 17 alien classes · 11 power-ups
- Built with
- Swift and SpriteKit, renderer and all
- Licence
- GNU GPL v2, a from-scratch remake of XGalaga by Joe Rumsey
- Soundtrack
- Original composition © 2026 MW Design
- Developer
- MW Design
MW Design is an independent studio crafting mobile games, Wear OS arcade titles and custom smartwatch watch faces since 2016. See our other games.
Out now
One purchase covers all five
XGalaga HD is out on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, with the Apple Watch app included.
$1.99 · No ads, no in-app purchases, no tracking.