Swish Shot

Swish Shot is a free basketball shooting game you play right in your browser. You stand on an outdoor court at dusk, look up at the hoop and flick the ball toward it. The speed of your flick is the power and its direction is the aim: a quick, straight flick sends a high arc toward the rim, a slow one falls short, a crooked one clangs off the side. The ball flies in a small 3D world with a real rim, backboard and net, so a near miss rattles round the rim before it drops or rolls out, and a clean shot snaps the net with a satisfying swish. It is the classic flick basketball game, with no download and nothing to learn beyond one gesture, and one of the quickest of our sports games to pick up.

After every shot you walk to a new spot around the arc: close shots, angles from the wings where the backboard becomes your friend, long shots from the top of the key and three-pointers from behind the yellow line. Further shots need a harder flick and leave less room for error, so judging the distance is half the game. The moment the ball leaves your hand a green ring tells you if it was a perfect release: the right flick speed for that spot, which carries the ball exactly to the rim. Later the evening gets harder. Wind starts to blow across the court (watch the arrows and the streaks and aim into it), the shots get longer, and then the whole hoop starts to slide along the baseline, so you have to lead it like a moving target.

Every basket is worth 200 points, or 300 from behind the three-point line. A swish, nothing but net, or a bank shot off the backboard is worth half again as much. Make three in a row and the ball catches on fire for double points; make six and it is blazing for triple, until the next miss puts it out. That makes streaks the heart of a good score, and every shot a little more tense than the last. Every run is replayed and verified on our servers before it reaches the weekly and all-time leaderboards, which makes Swish Shot a natural fit for our competitive games.

You play Endless, and it has no clock: you have three hearts, a miss costs one, and every four makes in a row win one back, so you keep shooting until the wind, the distance and the sliding hoop finally get you. Your first five shots are a free warm-up. A 60-second Shootout on the same court, the classic race to make as many baskets as you can before the buzzer, is one of the games The Daily can deal you, which puts Swish Shot with our quick games too.

The controls work the same everywhere. On a phone or tablet, put your thumb anywhere on the screen and flick it up, then let go: it is a one-handed game made for mobile. On a computer, press the mouse, drag up quickly and release while the mouse is still moving, which makes it just as good on PC; press P to pause. If you like lining up a shot and feeling it land, try our aim games next, from fireworks to mini golf.