Kris Steele and Fun Infused Games have recently released their third game titled Hypership Out of Control. I honestly can’t help but wonder if this game was inspired by the Toyota “uncontrolled acceleration” thing that was going on earlier this year. It wouldn’t be terribly challenging to draw some parallels, but I suppose there are lots of situations that could inspire a game about a Hypership perpetually accelerating into a gauntlet of doom.

Gameplay

Hypership Out of Control is a considerable divergence from the style of game that Fun Infused Games has released in the past. As you may recall both Nasty and Abduction Action featured a 2D side scrolling style of play. The first featuring some nice platforming and the second involving mostly dropping heavy things on people using a tractor beam. HOC, as I am referring to it from this point on as, features a vertical scrolling retro arcade style of play with a decidedly quarter hungry vindictiveness.

The mechanics are pretty straight forward: shoot, dodge, go faster, get points, and pick up power ups. As you progress through the game you will continue to go faster and faster until you hit your ships maximum speed or you die. The power ups are mostly what you’d expect, bombs, higher fire power, shields, invulnerability, and a speed reset. All of these mechanics feel pretty good, there is nothing really out of place and they all work as advertised.

The difficulty of the game is of particular note. As I previously mentioned this game feels quarter hungry. Now if your sneakers have never graced the sticky floors of an old arcade you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, and if your sneakers have, you may want to toss those old things and pick up some new kicks. The old games used to favor a mechanical difficulty that was only overcome by mastery of the game. So what I’m saying is, HOC would have totally blown through your Dixie cup full of Chuck’e'Cheese tokens by the time you had mastered wave 2. All that said, if the difficulty of HOC was any less it would be mind numbing, and if it were any harder, you’d cry and take your ball home. So it seems Fun Infused Games managed to strike a fantastic balance between the two.

The design of the games levels, or in this case “Waves” is pretty rock solid. There has been a good deal of care put into making sure you can zam through these levels at max speed in a good fluid motion. At the same time, there is almost never a single right route that will solve all your problems. This has a really nice feel to it as it lets you sort of explore for yourself the various choices and what works for you.

The framerates of HOC are typically solid. I say typically because there are some very obvious random clunks during gameplay where it will lock for a fraction of a second. The issue is fairly minor, it could occasionally kill you, but it doesn’t manifest itself terribly frequently. The menu screens feel pretty sticky as well but this is a very forgivable issue, since it doesn’t negatively effect the actual game play.

All things considered HOC is a pretty technically sound game whose quick play style and arcade feel makes for a good time. The game also has scoreboards and multiplayer so feel free to give your chums a good old fashioned score hazing.

Audio/Visual

Visually speaking, HOC has taken on a traditional retro aesthetic. I would love to tell you it’s the best retro art I’ve seen on the platform, but I can’t really do that. It isn’t really that there is anything overtly wrong with it, just that there are times when some things don’t feel quite right with this retro world, and hell that could be anything from using too large a color pallet to sneaking a gradient tool in there for shading. I will however, say that it looks just fine and does contribute positively to the overall experience. There is a pretty good amount of visual diversity from wave to wave. The backgrounds are alright. There is a fairly typical parallaxed star scape thing going on. Again it won’t wow you, but if it wasn’t there you’d notice the vacuousness immediately, so in that regard it does its job.

Now the sound on the other hand is a whole different story. The game sounds great. I quite literally found myself tapping my toe to the chiptune beats. The sound effects of the game are also very well done, there is a lot of repetitive sound effects as you may imagine in this style of game but they manage to never become a nuisance, and in my book that’s a win. There is one exception, the death laugh, whats up with that laugh anyways Kris? It’s hilarious because it’s bad.

Summary

A few blemishes here and there, but ultimately a great experience. The game is rocking the hard to argue with 80 point price tag and hell, I’d pay that much just for the game’s awesome music jam.