Drone Command — Free Browser Drone Operator Game
Drone Command puts you in a bunker control room as the sensor operator of a reconnaissance-strike drone. The page above is your console: the monitor shows the live camera feed from a drone auto-orbiting a procedurally generated area of operations. You never fly the aircraft — you control the gimbal camera and the weapons, and every decision runs through one question: is that heat blob a hostile convoy, or a family? No download, no account — it runs in your phone or desktop browser.
How to play
Each run is a tour of short sorties (about two minutes each). The loop is recon → designate → strike → return to base:
- Recon. Stay at wide zoom (×1–×2) and scan heat signatures: press and hold on a contact (touch) or hold the right mouse button over it (desktop) until the ring fills. Scanned hostiles become designated and pay double points; scanned civilians get a cyan no-strike dome you must not hit.
- Strike. Zoom to ×4–×8 and pick a weapon: 1 the 25 mm cannon (fast, watch the heat gauge and lead moving targets with the ✕ marker), 2 the 40 mm grenade launcher (slow arc, small blast — great against scattered infantry), or 3 the guided missile (hold on a target at high zoom to lock, then fire and ride the missile cam). Consecutive kills build a combo multiplier up to ×8 — it resets if you overheat, miss with a missile, or hit a civilian.
- Pressure. The battery is your clock, and anti-air wakes up where you look. Zooming in raises the AA hit chance against you; SAM locks can be broken by snapping back to ×1 wide optics. Three civilian casualties in a run ends it instantly with a stand-down order.
- Bank it. Your score is unbanked until you hold the RTB switch and survive the three-second extraction. Get shot down or run the battery to zero and the unbanked score is gone. Leave early and bank small, or greed for the priority-target bonus and risk everything — that choice is the whole game.
Touch controls: drag to pan, pinch to zoom, double-tap to toggle ×1/×4, hold a contact to scan or lock, and use the right-hand rail for weapons and FIRE. Desktop: drag or WASD to pan, wheel to zoom, click or Space to fire, right-hold to scan/lock, T thermal, M radar ping, hold R to return to base, Esc to pause.
A Daily Op rebuilds the same map for every player from the date, records your best score, and keeps a consecutive-day streak. Campaign runs ramp from a quiet first sortie to SAM-ringed targets by sortie ten — survive the tour and Overtime mode keeps scaling forever.
FAQ
- Is Drone Command free? Are there purchases?
- Completely free, with no real-money anything — no purchases, no currency, no wagering. The page shows standard labeled ad placeholders; that is the entire model.
- Do I need to install anything or make an account?
- No. It is a single web page using WebGL via three.js. High scores, daily streaks, settings and tutorial progress are saved in your browser's localStorage and never leave your device.
- Why do all the targets look the same?
- That's the point. In thermal (WHOT) mode every warm body is white-hot — hostile or civilian. Scanning is the only way to tell them apart before you shoot, and unscanned strikes near compounds are how mistakes happen.
- It feels slow on my phone — what can I do?
- Open settings and switch quality to LOW: it lowers the render resolution and decoration density. The game also auto-reduces resolution if the frame rate drops, and it pauses whenever the tab is hidden.
- Is there any blood or gore?
- No. Units are abstract icons and heat blobs viewed from 400 m altitude, in a deliberately cold instrument aesthetic. Failure states are about signal loss and stand-down orders, not gore.
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