Reflex Rush

How Reflex Rush measures you

The wait, the cue, and the penalty

Each round begins with a waiting phase. The delay before the go signal is randomised between roughly 1.2 and 3.4 seconds, redrawn every round, which is a wide enough spread that you cannot learn the rhythm and pre-load your press.

When the cue appears, the game timestamps it. When you respond, it timestamps that too and reports the difference in milliseconds. The measurement uses a high-resolution clock rather than frame counting, so the number is not rounded to your display’s refresh interval.

Responding during the waiting phase — before the cue — does not simply void the round. It records a fixed one-second penalty, which is far worse than any genuine reaction would have been. Guessing is actively punished, not merely discouraged.

The only strategy is refusing to anticipate

Because the delay is re-randomised every round across a two-second-wide window, there is no pattern to read. Any attempt to time the cue rather than react to it is a gamble against a distribution you cannot see, and the downside is a full second — larger than the entire spread between a fast reaction and a slow one.

What genuinely helps is preparation rather than prediction. Rest your finger in contact with the button or trackpad so the press is a movement of millimetres. Look at the panel rather than around it, since peripheral vision detects change more slowly than foveal vision. Keep your hand still during the wait, because a hand already in motion has to stop and reverse before it can press.

• Treat the penalty as the thing to avoid. One early press costs more than several merely-average rounds.
• Do not blink deliberately during the wait; a blink lasting a tenth of a second is enough to swallow a good result.
• Take the five rounds in one settled sitting — the score is the sum, so a single distracted round drags the whole set down.

A thousand minus your milliseconds

Each round scores one thousand minus your reaction time in milliseconds, with a floor of zero. React in 250 milliseconds and the round is worth 750 points. React in 400 and it is worth 600. Take longer than a full second and the round scores nothing at all — it cannot go negative.

The five rounds are summed for your final score, so the theoretical maximum is 5,000 and a realistic strong set lands well below that. The scale is deliberately linear: every millisecond you save is worth exactly one point, wherever on the range you save it.

Common mistakes

Every one of these is a way of trading a reliable result for a gamble.

• Trying to guess the cue. The delay is re-randomised every round across a two-second window, and an early press books a full-second penalty — the single most expensive outcome available.
• Hovering the finger above the button. Any gap has to be crossed after you see the cue. Resting in contact removes that travel entirely.
• Watching the whole screen. Fixing your gaze on the panel itself detects the change measurably sooner than catching it peripherally.
• Tensing up between rounds. A tense hand tends to twitch during the wait, and a twitch during the waiting phase is scored as an early press.

What is different about this version

Timing uses the browser’s high-resolution performance clock, taken at the moment the cue renders and at the moment of your input, so the reported figure is a real measurement rather than a count of animation frames. Every result is also floored at a minimum of one millisecond, which prevents a zero from being recorded as a suspiciously perfect reaction.

Pausing is handled honestly. If you pause or the tab is interrupted during a waiting phase, the round is restarted rather than resumed, so a backgrounded timer can never hand you a cue you were not present to see.

Written by the Silverweb Games team from this game’s own implementation. Last reviewed July 31, 2026.