What Are Piercing Shots in Games? Bullets That Pass Through

What are piercing shots in games? They are bullets that pass through enemies instead of stopping at the first one they hit. One shot can travel on and hit a second or third target in the same line.

If you want to see a piercing shot in action, Tank City Reboot is a free site of two tank games that play in your browser, and one of them has an upgrade that makes your shots go through more than one enemy.

What are piercing shots in games?

A normal shot has one job. It travels until it hits something, does its damage, and disappears. A piercing shot does its damage and then keeps going.

The word "piercing" comes from the idea of a bullet punching through a target. In games it is a simple rule: after a hit, the shot is not used up. It can hit the next enemy in its path.

How piercing bullets work: pass-through hits explained

Under the hood, most games track a shot as a small box that moves each frame. Every frame the game asks what the box is touching. If it touches an enemy, the enemy takes damage. For a normal shot the game then deletes the box. For a piercing shot the game instead lowers a counter and leaves the box alive.

That counter is the key idea. A piercing shot rarely goes through everything forever. It usually has a limit, such as "pass through two enemies, then stop." Walls often still stop it, unless the game says otherwise.

Tank City Zero Day, the second game on the site, works this way. Its Encryption upgrade lets each shot pass through one more enemy per level. Each shot that hits an enemy takes 1 hit point from it, and a pierced shot carries on to the next enemy in line. Each Encryption level adds one more enemy a shot can go through.

Piercing shots vs normal shots vs ricochet shots

Three kinds of shot are easy to mix up. Here is how they differ in plain terms.

• Normal shot: hits the first thing and stops.
• Piercing shot: hits an enemy and keeps going through the next one.
• Ricochet shot: hits a wall and bounces off to a new direction. You can read more in our post on what a ricochet shot is.

Piercing is about enemies. Ricochet is about walls. They solve different problems. Piercing helps when enemies are lined up. Ricochet helps when they hide behind cover.

Zero Day has both, and they stack. Its Load balancer upgrade gives each shot one bounce per level off silicon or the arena edge. Every shot carries its bounces, its pierce and its speed bonus together, so one bullet can bounce off a wall and then pass through enemies on the way back.

Why game designers add piercing shots

Designers use piercing for a few reasons.

• It rewards good positioning. You get more from a shot when you line enemies up. That is a skill, not a stat.
• It helps with crowds. When many weak enemies arrive at once, one shot that hits several of them keeps the game from feeling like a chore.
• It makes upgrades feel different. More damage is a number. Passing through a line of enemies is a visible change in how the game plays.

Games often hand out powers like this as choices or as chance finds. If that idea is new to you, our post on random drops explains how loot and power-ups appear. In Zero Day the pick works as a card choice. After each wave you are offered three upgrades drawn from the ones not yet at their limit, and you take one. Encryption may or may not be among them, so you plan around what the game shows you.

How piercing shots deal with armor and tough enemies

This is where people get the wrong idea. Piercing does not make a tough enemy easier to kill. It makes a group easier to kill.

If you are new to the idea of enemies that take several hits, read what armor is in video games. In Zero Day, each shot that hits an enemy takes 1 hit point. The enemies have different totals:

• Botnet drone: 1 hit
• Worm: 2 hits (it splits into two halves when destroyed, and each half takes 1 hit)
• Ransomware: 3 hits
• Cryptominer: 5 hits
• Zero-day boss: 40 hits on wave 5, and 15 more for each later boss

A piercing shot still only takes 1 hit point from each enemy it touches. A ransomware tank still needs three hits. But if three of them stand in a row, one volley that goes through all three spreads its damage across the line. Each target takes one hit from the same bullet.

Against the boss, piercing matters in a different way. The boss comes with groups of botnet drones. A shot that clears a drone and still reaches the boss does two jobs at once.

How to aim and line up piercing shots

Piercing rewards a simple habit: think in lines, not in targets.

1. Pick a lane. A shot only goes through what is in its path. Move so that two or more enemies sit on one straight line from your cannon.
2. Shoot along the line, not across it. A shot fired across a row of enemies meets only one of them. Face the row end on, so the shot travels along it.
3. Hold Fire. The game says it plainly: hold Fire to keep shooting. Zero Day shoots again as soon as the wait between shots ends, and Cache shortens that wait.
4. Dash out of trouble. You cannot be hit while dashing, so you can cut across a line and come out facing it. Our post on dash moves covers the basic idea.

Remember that your shots also cancel enemy shots, so a shot can clear your lane as well as hit a target.

Piercing shots in Tank City Reboot

The piercing upgrade lives in Tank City Zero Day. Your tank moves and fires in eight directions, and you survive as many waves as you can. The upgrade is called Encryption, and its card reads: Encryption scrambles data so only the holder of the key can read it. In game terms: shots pass through one more enemy.

Here is a worked example from the early waves. Waves 1 and 2 send only drones, which come in threes and hunt you, and worms. Say you picked Encryption at level 1 after wave 1. Now a drone moves into a line with a second one behind it. You face them and hold Fire. One shot hits the first drone, takes its single hit point, and carries on to the second. Both are gone from one bullet.

That also helps your score. Zero Day has a kill chain. Every kill within 2.5 seconds of the last one adds to it, and the multiplier is x1, then one more for every three kills, up to x8. A piercing volley that clears several enemies at once feeds that chain faster than shooting them one by one. Drones are worth 50 points and worms 100, each times the multiplier.

Encryption also combines with the other upgrades:

• Multithreading fires 1, 2, 3 or 5 shots per volley in a spread. Every shot in the spread carries the pierce.
• Cache shortens the wait between shots, so you fire more piercing shots in the same time.
• Pipelining makes shots faster and, at level 2, lets them break silicon.

There is one thing to keep in mind about walls. Piercing is about enemies. Silicon and firewall block shots, and a firewall wall breaks and stops the shot that hits it. A pierce upgrade does not make a shot go through terrain.

The first game, at the home page, plays differently. Its cannon grows through Overclock levels, and the top level breaks silicon. It has no piercing upgrade, so a normal shot is the only kind there, and it makes a fair point of comparison for Zero Day.

Frequently asked questions

Do piercing shots do more damage?

No. A piercing shot does the same damage to each enemy it hits. In Zero Day every shot that hits takes 1 hit point. The gain is that one shot can hit several enemies.

Can piercing shots go through walls?

Usually not. Piercing is about passing through enemies. In Zero Day, silicon and firewall still block shots. Pipelining at level 2 lets shots break silicon, which is a different upgrade.

How many enemies can one piercing shot hit?

It depends on the game. In Zero Day, Encryption lets each shot pass through one more enemy per level, so every level you take adds one more target to a shot's path.

Are piercing shots better than ricochet shots?

Neither is better in every case. Piercing is best against enemies in a line. Ricochet is best against enemies behind walls. In Zero Day you can take both, because each shot carries both bonuses.

Get started

Open the site, press Play, and click the game so it has focus. Move with the arrow keys or WASD, fire with Space, J or Z, and on a phone use the touch pad that floats over the game. In Zero Day, dash with Shift, K or X. When Encryption shows up on an upgrade card, take it and try to line up your next volley.

Play Tank City Reboot: it is free, plays in your browser on a computer or a phone, and needs no account.