Rivet Rush

Bruno throws, Enzo climbs, everything rolls downhill.

ActionCategory

HardDifficulty

FreePrice

NoneInstall

Rivet Rush is a single-screen climb, and the only game here with gravity in it. You play Enzo: hard hat, moustache, and five floors of somebody else's building to get up. Bruno, the foreman, is at the top of it in a black hat with a cigar, and every rivet on the board comes out of his hands. He walks the top beam between throws and winds up before each one, so where the next rivet enters is something you watch rather than something you memorise. Steel girders are stacked up the screen, joined by ladders, and every one of them is sloped. That slope is the game: rivets run downhill along a beam, drop off its low end onto the girder below, and set off the other way, so the traffic reverses on every floor and a route that was clear on the way up is not on the way down. Some rivets are runners and take the ladders down instead, which is what stops the lower floors becoming safe once you have read the pattern above them. Every rivet that survives the trip rolls into the oil drum on the ground, and one that catches gets up and follows you: fire walks the beams and climbs the ladders, and unlike a rivet it does not simply pass by. Jumping either one scores; touching either costs a life. A hammer sits on a middle girder and makes both destructible for a few seconds, and it is the only moment in a level when climbing back down is the right move. The sites cycle, two of them with floors broken into segments you can walk off the end of, and the top of each one is a platform reached by a single last ladder. The Rivets is a different job altogether: no beam to reach, eight pins holding the structure together, and you pull them by walking over them until the whole thing comes down with Bruno on it. Reaching the top pays what is left of a bonus that has been draining since the level started, so the safe climb and the fast climb are different climbs.

Play Rivet Rush View high scores

Controls

Keyboard
`Arrows or WASD`	Walk and climb
`Space`	Jump
`Enter`	Start
`P or Esc`	Pause
`R`	Restart

Touch: A thumb pad in the bottom left and a jump button in the bottom right, over the board. Hold a direction to walk or climb, since a ladder is a hold rather than a tap.

Tips

A fall off a beam kills. Your own jump drops you 41 pixels and a floor is at least 80, so jumping is always safe and stepping off an open end never is. On the broken sites and the Assembly Line that turns every gap from a shortcut into a commitment.
Fire is the thing to plan around, not rivets. A rivet has one direction and you can wait it out; fire picks the ladder you were going to use. You are faster than it on the flat, so cross past it early rather than backing away from it up a dead floor.
Jumping a fire gets you past it. It holds its heading while you are over it and for a moment after you land, so a jump buys you the length of the jump plus whatever it walks the wrong way before it notices. Two fires each work a half of the site and will not stand on each other, so there is always a side to come down on.
Watch the drum. Every rivet that gets to the bottom rolls into it, and while there is room another fire stands up. Climbing fast is not just worth more points, it is fewer things chasing you.
Jump for points, not for safety. A rivet you can walk away from is worth 100 if you hop it instead, 150 for a fire, and the bonus counter is draining the whole time you dither.
Bruno is a body. You cannot walk through him and you cannot jump him, so meeting him on a beam is a choice between waiting for him to pace away, taking the other ladder, or spending the hammer. It will not kill him, but it knocks him back for three seconds, which is long enough to be past.
Watch Bruno, not just the rivets. He winds up before every throw and he walks the beam between them, so the wind up tells you both when the next one is coming and roughly where it will land.
Read the slope before you commit to a girder. Rivets always run downhill, so the low end of a beam is where they pile up and the high end is where they arrive. On the broken sites the low end is a hole in the middle of the screen, and so is the drop.
Ladders are the safest place on the board, because nothing on the girder can touch you while you are between floors. They are also where the runners come down and where the fire is heading, so do not linger.
The hammer is worth planning a detour for, but only downward. Six seconds is 200 a rivet and 300 a fire, and you cannot take it up the ladder with you in any useful way.
The top is a platform with one ladder onto it, which makes the last climb the tightest of the level. Fire cannot follow you up there, but a rivet coming down that ladder can end the run three feet from the finish.
On The Rivets there is nowhere safe and no rivets to dodge, only fire. Most floors are split down the centre, so once you are on a side you are on it until the ground or the top beam, and those pins sit at the open ends where the next step is into nothing.
The third floor of The Rivets is the one solid span on the site, and its two pins are in the middle of it. Pull the second and the middle comes down about a second later, taking anything standing on it with it. That is the answer to being followed: let the fire get onto the span, then pull. The ladders at either end survive, so it costs you the crossing and nothing else.