How to Play Pesky Humans

Main Content

Basic Game Play

Pesky Humans is a point and click game reminiscent of the old, stand-up arcade games like Missile Command and Liberator. As enemy ships start to fly towards your newly-discovered world, you need to click just a short distance in front of their craft. It takes a short while for the targeting scope to lock on and fire, so leading your enemy is essential to ensure the attack lands true.

The game lasts for seven stages, with each stage getting just a little longer than the last. During that time, red and green enemy ships will try to beam down colony bases to the surface, while grey scouts try to locate your ship and blue fighters respond with force. Yellow boss ships will appear during the last minute of any given stage, trying to keep your ship occupied while their brethren double-down on colonizing the planet.  If you can hold them off for all seven stages, you can earn your heroes' reward. 

The Pesky Human Spacecraft

The Colony Ships

All colony ships have at least two bases stored in their holds.  Give them enough time and they'll beam down their cargo and then flee the planet to pick up some more.  Watch out for these guys, they're sneaky!  

The Frigate Ships

Frigate ships usually only hold a single colony base, although their larger class cousins will carry more.  They tend to be piloted by retired figher pilots out to make a quick buck or guys who barely made it out of flight school. 

The Scout Ships

Scout ships carry the necessary hardware to detect your nuclear missiles and your ship, if they get close enough.  You'll see obvious icons appear over you when they've spotted you.  Most fighter ships will rely on scouts to attack.  

The Fighter Ships

Heavily shielded, fighter ships launch missiles at your ship and your nukes, or if enough scouts have spotted you at the same time, they'll fire lasers instead.  The larger class ships have scanning hardware of their own, too.

The Colony Bases

Residential Bases

The core component of the Pesky Human base.  These must always be present on a planet, so destroying these prevents the Humans from building more complex structures. 

Agricultural Base

For some reason these Humans need to eat food.  These bases are the second core component of a base and are needed before more complex structures can be built.

Industrial Base

Well, once they get eating and living areas out of the way, Humans start to mine and build stuff.  Industrial bases are a sign that the planet is starting to become self sufficient, and it's a bad thing. 

Power Stations

Of course, building large planetary bases starts to require a steady supply of power.  Due to how they're connected to their neighbors, sometimes taking out these structures destroys a neighboring base. 

Sensor Base

These sensor and communication stations will report incoming nuclear weapons.  Once these start popping up, the base is going to get a lot better at defending itself. 

Weapons Platform

The weapons platform is the second to last structure Humans will build on their planet.  Once built, they're very hard to get rid of, as they constantly fire lasers at all nearby, detected missiles. 

Shield Generator

The last structure built on a planet, once this base is in place, the game is over.  The planet can now resist all planetary bombardment and is considered a fully developed and independent colony.

Getting Started Tips

It's easy to get overwhelmed when starting a game.  You can pause the game at any time by hitting the escape key to purchase ship upgrades and one-time power ups.     

Destroying larger ships (and flying around and blowing up asteroids on the Stage Select screen) will sometimes generate blue and red crystals.  Surviving for several stages or successfully defending a planet will also earn you additional crystals.

Blue crystals should not be hoarded.  Spend them on buying bombing runs and raiding parties, which will either destroy every planetary base on a planet or destroy a lot of ships on the screen, respectively.  Red crystals can be spent on permanent ship upgrades that you can equip via the pause menu as well.