Fly a drone through your town: tricks, races, Coin Rush and a hover car

Get down into the streets

From above, a city builder is a map. Plotline has three ways to get down into the streets you built: Walk, Fly and Drive. Drag a button onto the ground, or just click it, and you are there.

Flying

Fly gives you a drone. There are seven: the Pod, a nimble Racer, and five ducted-fan designs called Hornet, Shadow, Strider, Octo and Twin. Their props blur as they spin up, and they lean into the wind when the weather blows.

The controls are built for a mouse:

• Left-drag up or down to fly forward or back, and across to turn.
• Right-drag to look round the drone.
• W and S climb and descend, the arrow keys fly forward, back and turn, and A and D slide sideways.

A gamepad works too, and phones get on-screen sticks. The camera follows behind, pulls further back, or sits in the drone's nose for a first-person view.

Buildings are solid, and you will crash into them. Trees are solid only at the trunk, so you can thread through the branches.

Tricks and scores

Ask for a flip, a roll or a spin and the drone pops up and turns over. Ask again before it finishes and you get a double or a triple. Tricks chain into combos that bank after a moment. Flying low or fast scores more, and repeating the same trick scores less each time. A crash loses the combo you had not banked.

Races

Race lays rings out over the town. Each level has eight courses: Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert. The rings get smaller and further apart as the level goes up. Every course earns a medal against its par time, and your best time is kept for each one. Every course is checked against the town, so no ring hangs inside a roof and no leg runs through a building. A crash puts you back at the last ring you passed.

Coin Rush

Coins scatters gold coins along the roads, plus a few big ones above the tallest buildings. Each coin is worth ¤2,000 to the town and a big one ¤10,000, up to a daily limit. It is a way back for a town that has run short of money, and when funds run low a yellow prompt suggests it.

Keys float over homes that are still being built or that stand empty. Fly through one and a family moves in.

Autopilot

Press Auto, or P, and the drone flies itself round the town along the roads. It holds a steady height over valleys and rivers and climbs over anything tall. Touch any control and you have it back. Autopilot is a good way to watch the town at work, or to film it.

Driving

Drive puts you in a hover car. It floats just above the road, and W lifts it up to about five metres more to clear the traffic. It banks through bends and its rotors blur. At night its headlamps light the road ahead.

In the library, too

A published town keeps all of this. Open one from the library and you can walk, fly and drive through it, with the town's clock, weather and sound. The town itself stays as its builder published it: it does not grow, and coins collected there are only for practice.

Start a town at zdraw.app/play, or find one marked Play in the library.