AFTERBURN

Touch the left and right halves of the screen to fire the matching thruster. Hold both to lift straight up, and ease off one to tilt and steer. Set down gently and upright on each platform to refuel and score.

Every landing is worth 1,000 points, plus up to 1,000 more for the fuel left in your tank, so efficient flights score higher. The platforms shrink as you climb, and higher up they start to move. Your run ends when you crash or run out of fuel.

Ranked is the full game, and only Ranked runs count for your best score and the leaderboards. Beginner has lighter gravity, a smaller ship, gentler handling and more forgiving landings, so it's a good place to learn. A Beginner run shows how many platforms you reached instead of a score.

Open the Hangar. It has 5 hulls, each with its own color variants, and 6 flames. They unlock as you play: score milestones, pads landed, total runs, days played, your daily streak and other lifetime totals. They're cosmetic and don't change how the ship flies.

Your best Ranked score is posted automatically to five boards: city, region, country, continent and world. If you sign in with Game Center (iPhone) or Google Play Games (Android), you also get a friends board. You can search any city to see its board.

If you allow notifications, Afterburn tells you when someone passes you on your city board. Alerts only start once your score there is 3,000 or more, and you get at most one a day. You can turn them off under Rival Alerts in the game's settings.

Afterburn is free and shows an occasional full-screen ad between runs, never during a flight. In the EEA, UK and Switzerland, Google's consent form appears first. On iPhone, the one-time "Buy Me a Coffee" purchase in Settings removes the ads for good, and Restore Purchases brings it back on a new device. The Android version doesn't offer the purchase at the moment.

Game Center (iPhone) or Google Play Games (Android) ties your runs to one account, so your best scores follow you to a new device. For the local boards, the game asks only for your approximate location and turns it into a city name. It never stores your coordinates. If you say no, it estimates your city from your IP address instead, and on Android, if that fails too, it uses your mobile network's country. Our Privacy Policy has the details.

Yes. If the app closes mid-run, the next launch offers to resume from the last pad you landed on, with the score you had there.

The Stats screen in the Hangar shows your lifetime numbers: runs, platforms landed, crashes, days played, your streak and more. The share button after a run, or on the leaderboards, makes a score card you can send to friends.

Email us your device model and iOS or Android version and we'll help. A stuck leaderboard sync usually clears after you relaunch the app with a working internet connection.