TowerFall is a game that you can pick up and play with very little prior knowledge. If you’ve ever hopped around in a platformer before, the basics should be intuitive. As a party game, accessibility is a central goal of the design. But there are layers of depth to dig through as you improve your archery skills. TowerFall really begins to expand as your group transitions to playing competitively.

Mastery of the movement systems in particular will allow you to pull off stunts which may seem at first to break the rules of the game. This post will go in-depth on one of the highest-level TowerFall techniques for competitive players: Hyper Jumping. It’s going to get pretty technical.

Hyper Jumps allow you to leap across entire arenas in one smooth motion. They’re difficult to use well, but it’s possible to perform hyper jumps with enough precision to land directly on enemies’ skulls from across the stage. Here’s how they work.

This is a regular jump, for comparison. It’s a safe move. It’s easy to execute, moves predictably, and you aren’t left vulnerable because you can always dodge mid-flight to catch arrows.

This is a Super Jump. To perform it, start by holding the analog stick diagonally forward and down to run. Next, hit the dodge button. This will start a dodge slide, which you can immediately cancel by jumping. Keep holding forward and you’ll retain your speed boost for a distance.

It’s important to hold the stick diagonally forward and down at the start. Holding just forward, you’ll enter a regular dodge rather than a slide. You can still jump out of a regular dodge of course, but dodge slides are faster and give you more distance.

Keep in mind that Super Jumps are a form of dodge cancelling - this means that your dodge cooldown starts from the moment you jump. All dodge cancels leave you vulnerable, unable to catch arrows for a short time, gaining you mobility in return.

With Super Jumps you reach higher-than-normal speeds by jump cancelling out of a slide, but that speed is capped. There’s a way around this cap with another form of cancelling.

During any dodge, you can tap the dodge button a second time to cancel it - this is known as a tap cancel. You may have noticed that your archer moves very quickly as a dodge begins, and then slows to a near stop before it finishes. When you tap cancel a dodge, you keep the speed you had at the moment you cancelled it. The sooner after the start of a dodge you cancel, the faster you’ll go! But if you accidentally try to dodge and cancel on the same frame, the game won’t register the cancel at all and you’ll just perform a regular old dodge instead.

Because it’s very difficult to double-tap the same button in such short time windows, I recommend using a “galloping” motion across the top of your controller. On PS4 every button on top of the controller is a dodge button, so I press R1 and then L1 in very quick succession for my cancels.

Hyper Jumping is a specific application of this technique. The start will be familiar: run forward, holding diagonally forward and down (remember, slides are faster than normal dodges). Then dodge, immediately cancel the dodge by hitting another dodge button, and jump, in that order. Continue holding forward as you fly across the stage to get the most distance.

There are many creative applications for dodge cancels - hyper jumps are just the beginning! Once your group masters these techniques, it’s like you’re playing a whole new game. Happy cancelling!