Playing on Slow Wi-Fi: Which Games Still Start in Seconds
Half a megabit per second is the kind of speed a phone can drop to on a weak signal or a crowded network. To see how the SalutGames games cope with that, all thirteen were loaded on 14 October 2026 through a deliberately poor connection: 0.5 Mbit/s down, 0.25 Mbit/s up, 300 milliseconds of delay on every round trip, and the processor slowed to a quarter of its speed, roughly a weak signal on a budget phone.
The short answer: twelve of the thirteen games had their first real screen up within three and a half seconds. How long they take to load completely is a different story, and it depends almost entirely on download size.
First frame on a weak connection
| Game | First frame | Fully loaded |
|---|---|---|
| Gravity Lab | 1.0 s | 2.7 s |
| Silent Maze | 1.4 s | 3.1 s |
| Trap Castle | 1.6 s | 44.4 s |
| One Tap Hero | 1.6 s | 90.7 s |
| Rondo | 1.6 s | 64.3 s |
| Skyhook | 1.7 s | 18.1 s |
| Gravibot | 1.7 s | 22.6 s |
| Last-Second Landing | 1.7 s | 25.7 s |
| Lightkeeper | 1.9 s | 32.3 s |
| Block Drop | 2.5 s | 2.4 s |
| Lost Corridors | 2.8 s | 2.7 s |
| Dot Box Duel | 3.4 s | 3.3 s |
| Tap Burst | 69.7 s | 71.9 s |
The median first frame was 1.7 seconds. In the earlier speed test, on a connection three times faster, it was 0.89 seconds.
Three groups
Done in about three seconds. Gravity Lab, Silent Maze, Block Drop, Lost Corridors and Dot Box Duel finished loading completely in 2.4 to 3.3 seconds. They are small, from 90 KB to 1.4 MB, and the four smallest draw most of their art in code. On a bad connection these are the safe choices: what appears on screen is the whole game.
On screen fast, still downloading. Skyhook, Gravibot, Last-Second Landing, Lightkeeper and Trap Castle showed their first screen in under two seconds, then kept downloading artwork in the background, finishing 18 to 44 seconds after the start. Their first screen comes from what's needed to start, and the rest follows.
The heavy two. One Tap Hero and Rondo also showed a first screen in 1.6 seconds, but finishing their downloads took 91 and 64 seconds. Most of that is recorded sound and art: 5.4 MB and 4.6 MB in total.
The one that waits
Tap Burst showed only its loading screen, a yellow balloon bouncing on a blue background, for almost 70 seconds. It isn't the largest game, but it is the only one that waits for its world's artwork to arrive before drawing its title screen, so on a slow connection most of the download stands between the player and the game. On a normal connection that wait is around two seconds.
The trick that beats a bad connection
The same test opened every game a second time. On the return visit, most games downloaded about one kilobyte, because the browser keeps their files for a year. A game opened once on good Wi-Fi stays almost entirely on the device for as long as the browser keeps its cache. The next time it's opened, on one bar of signal in a queue, there's very little left to download.
Two habits follow from the numbers:
- On a weak connection, pick a small game. Gravity Lab, Silent Maze, Block Drop, Lost Corridors and Dot Box Duel are fully loaded in about three seconds even at half a megabit.
- Open the bigger games once on good Wi-Fi. After that first load, they start from the device.
How the test was run
Each game was opened from its address on salutgames.net in Chrome with an empty cache, through a network limited to 0.5 Mbit/s down and 0.25 Mbit/s up with 300 ms of added delay, and with the processor slowed four times. One run per game. "First frame" is the first contentful paint; "fully loaded" is the browser's load event.
