Raze

Raze went up on Armor Games on 25 February 2010 under the account of programmer Justin Goncalves ("JuiceTin"), with artist Addison Rodomista credited alongside him — the two-person team that would go on to found Sky9 Games and, later, build the Strike Force Heroes series on much of the same foundation. It reached Kongregate under Rodomista's account roughly two weeks later, on 8 March 2010, and was mirrored to other portals over the following months, as was standard practice for a free Flash release with no exclusivity deal attached. It is worth being precise about that date because Raze is sometimes filed under 2011 in secondary listings — most likely because it won Best Shooting Game at Mochi Media's 2011 Flash Gaming Summit, an awards show that judged the previous year's releases. The award is real and worth crediting; the release date it gets attached to is not.

Two campaigns, one war, the same maps

The idea driving Raze is more ambitious than its budget or presentation would suggest. Clear the human campaign — you're a Raze Program soldier fighting off an alien invasion, mission by mission, through a sequence that plays like a straightforward 2D run-and-gun — and the game unlocks a second, alien campaign that puts you on the other side of the same conflict, seen through an alien commander's eyes. For a free browser game with no writing budget to speak of, that's a genuinely clever way to double the perceived content without doubling the art or level design: reframe the fight rather than invent a second one.

The trouble is the reframing doesn't hold up once you're actually playing it. A meaningful number of alien-campaign missions sit on the same maps as their human-campaign counterparts, with broadly the same enemy layouts, and Sky9's main lever for making the second campaign feel harder was raising the difficulty rather than rebuilding the encounter. Kongregate's own comment threads from the game's active years show players proposing specific fixes — turning particular alien-side missions into larger, differently-balanced fights rather than reused ones — which is a fairly direct signal that the audience clocked the repetition and wanted the second campaign to earn its place rather than just punish them harder for it. The idea of retelling a war from the other side is a good one. Raze doesn't fully build the content needed to make that idea land.

The shooting itself, and what the credits are for

Underneath the campaign framing, Raze plays as a fast 2D platform shooter: WASD or arrow keys to move and jump, mouse to aim and fire, number keys or Q/E to cycle a weapon loadout that grows as you go. Kills and mission wins earn credits, and credits buy new weapons, equipment and abilities between missions — a shop-and-upgrade loop that gives the shooting somewhere to go across what period write-ups describe as more than twenty missions per campaign, rather than leaving it as a flat arcade shmup with no progression at all. That loop is the part of Raze that Sky9 kept building on for the rest of the series, and it's easy to see why: it's a simple, legible reward structure that suits a game meant to be played in short browser sessions rather than one long sitting.

The shooting itself earned real praise from Armor Games' own community — weapon variety and the satisfaction of a good killstreak come up repeatedly in player comments from the game's active years — but it also drew a specific, recurring criticism: that the pace, especially once missions start stacking multiple enemies at once, outruns any real tactical decision-making and reduces to fast clicking under pressure rather than a skill test. Both things can be true of the same design. Raze's shooting is satisfying in short bursts and thin on depth across a longer session, which is a fair trade for a free 2010 portal game and a less generous one against the fuller shooters Sky9 would go on to build.

Rough edges the developers admitted to

Raze's own Kongregate listing carries developer notes acknowledging a black-screen bug and recommending players turn down graphics settings to reduce lag — a performance concern the studio itself flagged on the game's page rather than one only visible in player complaints. That's worth taking seriously as evidence: a 2010 Flash shooter running dozens of simultaneous sprites, particle effects and hit detection in a browser plugin was working within real technical limits, and Raze occasionally shows the strain. It doesn't derail the game, but it's a genuine rough edge rather than a nostalgia-tinted footnote, and it's one Sky9 was open about at the time.

Funding and where it lived

Raze was never behind a paywall and never carried a MochiAds preroll baked into the file itself, as far as this review could establish; its economics were the standard 2010 portal model, where Armor Games and Kongregate both ran advertising around the embedded game rather than charging to play it. There's no evidence of a site-lock keeping it exclusive to one portal — it spread to Kongregate, and later to smaller mirror sites, in the ordinary way free Flash games did. No premium edition, DLC, or paid unlock ever existed for it.

Playability today

The original .swf is not natively playable in a browser anymore — Flash Player itself was discontinued in January 2021 — but Raze survives. The Internet Archive's software library hosts a copy running through the Ruffle emulator, confirmed working when checked on 5 September 2026, and the game is also reported to be preserved in Flashpoint's offline archive, though this review was not able to independently verify the Flashpoint catalogue entry directly. Several modern browser-game aggregator sites also list playable copies, though this review did not verify what emulation those specific mirrors run on. The original highscore or save infrastructure Raze relied on while live on Armor Games and Kongregate is gone; what survives today is the campaign content running standalone, not the full 2010 portal experience.

Final verdict

Raze is a competent, occasionally impressive free shooter built around one genuinely good idea — telling the same war from both sides — that its own content couldn't fully support. The credit-shop progression loop and the shooting itself hold up as solid, era-appropriate browser-game design, and the reception at the time, a huge Armor Games audience and a Flash Gaming Summit award, was earned rather than accidental. But the alien campaign's reliance on reused maps and inflated difficulty rather than new design is a real structural shortfall, not a minor nitpick, and it's the reason this sits at a 7.0 rather than higher: a good idea, competently shot, that needed a second campaign built to match its own premise and didn't quite get one.

Players interested in where Sky9 took this formula next should look for Strike Force Heroes once it enters the Leetdom library, which swaps Raze's dual-campaign structure for a class system built on the same credit-and-unlock spine.