Dork Quadrant: Hypership Out of Control

HSOOC appears, initially, to be a shmup. It certainly looks like a shmup in the screenshots, but instead its more a topdown shmup with a gimmick. 'A gimmick' seems to be the running theme of this subset of reviews, though HSOOC is less "has a gimmick" and more "is built around a premise" when I think about it.

The premise is you're the usual sort of topdown shmup spaceship doing its thang when your space brakes are cut! Or, whatever, basically your space craft can not really slow down and goes increasingly fast. It's a very basic, very obvious idea that I'm not certain has really been explored all that much before. So instead of going from enemy to enemy, you're in a race against ... Well, you're just going fast and you're worried about running into things.

I got to use the Gotta Go Fast tag, which I didn't think I'd get to use til my regretful purchase of Sonic Lost World next year. (It's gonna happen, argh)

The game looks pretty good, and the sound track is enjoyable to listen to. I enjoy the tracks shifting between the different levels, though there doesn't feel like there's enough music but this sort of relates to the game's problems. The gameplay is largely simple stuff - the game is more or less score attack, though I imagine you can finish the game if you keep at it. There's no story line, though the levels do have little visual gags that make me smirk. One level just ... Has bees. And it goes oh no, bees!




The problems start to come in, in that the game's score attack methodology interacts with its difficulty poorly. You collect coins to boost your multiplier, and your multiplier is lost if you die. You have some number of lives - I want to say three, and strictly three, but maybe you can get bonus lives - but the extra lives are more frustration than good.

See, if you play through three levels and then die, fine. You die. The issue here is you lose all your speed and all your multiplier, so you get sudden whiplash from plodding forward at a snail's pace and having to get your multiplier back up. The end result is the game doesn't punish you gameplay-wise for dying, it punishes you enjoyment wise. Suddenly the game is just awful, and it feels really jarring to go from very fast to quite slow. You struggle to get your multiplier back up and honestly if I die I usually just turn the game off. It's also really hard to adjust to how far the ship moves as speed goes down, you find yourself reacting too early or too late and it just feels awful.

I honestly believe instead of using the lives system, the game should have used a lifebar that would allow them to adjust responses and keep the pace up as it is going. Running into something should blow off a big chunk of your life, but tapping against a wall instantly killing you just feels off and doesn't jive with the game's sense of inertia. It would be interesting as well if sometimes the choice was to slide off a wall instead of the very square, very binary movement the game has set up.

I really can't tell if I'm that bad at HSOOC or if it is legitimately tuned poorly. I've played for about two hours and while I feel terrible at the game, my score was top 25 for a while, which just seems weird and buggy. Or that no one played it, which is sort of sad, since the music is really good and there is at least one really good hour of gameplay. It doesn't seem like many people are actually finishing the game, so it's hard to recommend since like me I imagine you're going to be seeing a lot of the early stages. The game doesn't do much to really build up variety.

I mean I like the game, but as with a lot of other difficult games, it feels like you need things to make the beginning of the game different and interesting. Like I died a million times in Rogue Legacy and Risk of Rain, which are very hard games indeed, but I always wanted to go back. Here, you just skid on the feeling of being unfinished and redo the beginning a couple times, then like DRM, you're bored. Does the game have more? I don't know, and at this point, I just super don't care to find out.

The worst sign of lack of polish, as an aside, is this weird bit when you start the game - which flat out takes too long - where you hit A like four times in a row, and then it coughs up an error sound at you. What happened? Oh you have to hit start once in the string of As and only once. Other weird moment is noting the multiplier caps at 5, but you can continue to collect coins to 5x99 which ... Does not do anything as far a sit seems to inform me. You're not really paying a lot of attention to score in the game, you're just hanging on, so I could have missed something. Not sure why your speed hits 'MAX' but your multiplier does not.

I sort of wish the game used its shmup roots a little better, as well. A boss of some kind - easy, but based around time - would help back up the action in a way that the whole speed down thing would fit well with. The shooting in generally doesn't quite gel with the speed thing.

On the other hand - I think it's a good premise, and I think the game is definitely fun, I just find the difficulty doesn't relate to the experience very well. You don't really want to go do it again, and you don't want to wait for the game to speed back up after you die. So you just turn it off, and ultimately I just stopped wanting to play it. It just gets kind of tiresome, and you know it was designed around memorization which doesn't do much for me in this era. This isn't back on the NES, I'm not a captive audience.

I would generally rate this game as something to pick up in a bundle - It's not bad, and it's worth a try, but it doesn't quite succeed at what it sets out to do. It's certainly got some charm, but it could use a bit more polish and a bit more content.