Space Guerrilla is a fixed-screen shooter in the vein of Space Invaders but with some interesting twists. The player controls their tank at the bottom of the screen and must prevent an alien invasion. Instead of the typical four bunkers, there are three pieces of scenery with buildings. The attract screen starts with a little animation of aliens landing on one of them and peeing.

Another difference with the typical Space Invaders clone is that while the ships fly in a block formation, they don't go back and forth between the screen boundaries. Instead they fly past and go out of view again, before flying back. Some ships also dive down towards the bottom of the screen like in Galaxian.

When the player loses all their lives the game is lost.