Digital Cybercherries is small development team who clearly had a vision for their product. Unfortunately, outside of its premise, Hypercharge: Unboxed really doesn’t do anything to make it stand out from the crowd.
The story is pretty cheesy but, yet, kind of forgettable. What it boils down to is that a line of action figures has made a device called the Hypercore, which stores childhood memories of beloved toys. One toy, a figure named Major Evil, wants to destroy these cores as he was never played with at all by his owner and, now, it’s up to Max Ammo and his team to protect the cores and stop him. Though it does give a reason for why the toys are going at it and does have a cool premise, the story really just feels tacked on and, again, forgettable. In fact, outside of a comic book paneled cutscene before each stage, which are nicely drawn, there really isn’t much in the way of storytelling here.
I will say the locations you fight are nicely varied and detailed, ranging from a bedroom to a Toys ‘R’ Us-like store. Each map has special objectives you can complete and these range from simple, like collecting all the coins, to trickier ones, like platforming challenges and finding all the hidden collectables. Some of these are fun to do, but others, especially the ones involving platforming, were some of the more annoying ones as movement feels just a bit off. It’s not slippery or anything, it just feels a bit off, to me. Surprisingly, playing in third-person does alleviate most of the movement problems, so I’m curious why the game wasn’t strictly a third-person affair.
This leads me to my chief complaint with Hypercharge: Unboxed: It’s just boring. Outside of its premise and the fact that it’s a FPS, there is nothing here that makes it unique enough from others of its kind. Yes, it doesn’t have microtransactions or a battle pass, something the game’s marketing highlighted extensively, but it’s sad when that’s the best praise you can give a game nowadays. Ironically enough, that brings us to my first issue with the game and that is the unlock system. In order to unlock most everything in the game, you need to get medals on each level. There are Eight medals in total; four are available only on the easier difficulties while the other four are locked to the hardest ones and achieving these medals grants you either cosmetic unlockables for characters or buildables to protect your HyperCore. The latter is annoying as you pretty much have to have a near perfect run just to unlock the better defenses, which isn’t too hard but there are some levels which will really test your patience and have you hitting that Restart button more times than you can count.
You do get different characters to play as and each one has a basic starting weapon unique to them (like a bug character having a grenade launcher). You can upgrade this gun by buying attachments in-game during each pre-round session or by finding attachments in the world, which includes being able to put two different barrels to have two different guns or one big one like a minigun on your base weapon. This I thought was a pretty cool idea and led to some fun experimentation with weapons, though I soon found that the best combo to use was a machine gun and shotgun combo. The other weapon attachments were fun to use, but I ended up sticking with those for most of the game as they were the easiest to handle and because of some of the enemies you fight, the worst being these annoying spinners (which look alot like Beyblades) and flying drones. These little punks can easily whittle your health and the hypercore’s health down to zilch if you aren’t paying attention and can easily ruin your run. There’s also this pony that flies around on certain maps and, I swear, you can not get a bead on them. I’ve tried multiple times to take them out and, most of the time, it’s seemingly by blind luck that I’m able to get them, even when using an accurate weapon.
The difficulty, speaking of blind luck, is another sour point for me. I was playing the game on regular mode and I was genuinely surprised with how hard the game got right off the bat. The first level starts off with you fighting simple bots for the first wave, but then in the next wave it introduces the spinners and, almost immediately, it feels like the game just shot up to hard mode and it doesn’t let up when they introduce flying enemies in the third wave. To me, it feels like I was just taught how to draw a vase and, now, was expected to animate the chase sequence for The Thief And The Cobbler.
As for the items to actually defend your tower? Like I said, if you want the best defenses, you’ll need to do near perfect or absolute perfect runs of each level. But, even when I got them, I never really used them. To me, it really seems like the best ones to use are the basic walls and floor traps as the turrets you can get, at least from what I was able to see, don’t really help that much. For most of the time, the bulk of the defense will lie on your and either your A.I partners, who are actually surprisingly helpful, or friends online. That’s another thing I will praise about this game: The A.I is surprisingly competent and will actually defend the hypercores, along with building defenses. It’s rare to see competent A.I in any game any more, so I have to give it props there.
Outside of the A.I, is there anything else in the game that I liked? There is. Firstly, like I said earlier, it is a good looking game. I love the little attention to details in the various levels and I do enjoy the nods to various real-world items like NERF and Head & Shoulders Shampoo, which that one actually gave me a laugh. I also do like the designs of the main characters you can play as and, OK, I like that you can play as a Wolf. I also think the voice-acting is good and would fit in nicely within a 90's cartoon. I also do like that the biggest inspirations for this game were the movie Small Soldiers and I can see that, though speaking personally? Some of the designs remind me of the metal band Grailknights music video for their song ‘Muscle Bound For Glory’. The final thing and this is just more of a personal one and that’s the fact that this game was made by only six people. That alone is impressive, especially this day and age. However, those positives are, sadly, not enough to really make me want to recommend this game
You can tell had a lot of hard work and love was put into the development of Hyperchage. I respect what the developers did and I, too, was happy for them when Xbox confirmed the console release. But, at the end of the day, I have to be honest, and the truth is this: Hypercharge: Unboxed is really just an average tower defense game with nothing to really make it stand out from the others.
GF Review Scores:
Graphics: 5/5 - I’m actually pretty impressed with how good the game looks and I do enjoy the little attention to details in various levels (except the bathroom level I mean, they didn’t have to go that much into detail).
Sound: 3/5 - There are some nice sound effects scattered throughout, but some of it seems a bit lifeless.
Gameplay: 3/5 - It’s a basic first-person tower defense game through and through with nothing really to make it stand out.
Final Score: 3 / 5
Hypercharge: Unboxed is just an average tower defense game with nothing to really make it stand out from the others.
Gaming Furever was provided a copy of the game for review by the Publisher
