I don’t care how old you are, YOU ARE NEVER TOO OLD TO PLAY WITH ACTION FIGURES OR TOYS! Let me paint you a picture to aid in reminiscing on the old days. You’ve set up a massive battle between the green army men who have teamed up with transformers and hot wheels, and you’re fighting your sibling’s furbies and barbies you stole. Uh, I mean borrowed. From their room. Without permission.

You have expanded the battlefield across the entire kitchen with squadrons set up along the benchtops for the upcoming invasions, and you have utilized every single prop and piece of furniture within the vicinity, just like in the movie Small Soldiers. The game is Hypercharge: Unboxed. An epic shooter game that has pretty much slid under a lot of people’s radars, and this is exactly what the level designs felt like.

I was sent through a portal to my childhood, and Digital Cybercherries captured that perfectly. Hypercharge: Unboxed has legitimately got some of the best-level designs released within the last 5 years. All levels invoke havoc, from close-quarter multi-level battlefronts down the toy aisles, to wide open areas using the backyard, kitchen, attic, bedroom, and garage. All levels fit the game design and concept.

Developed and published by Digital Cybercherries, you can pick this little gem up on PC, and Nintendo Switch. Though hopefully, we’ll see a release on Xbox and Playstation in the very near future.  The game was released on 31st January and features a PVE tower defense-styled Campaign and a PVP multiplayer.

The biggest thing anyone did as a child was to swap their action figures’ body parts. Slap Action Man’s arms onto Batman’s torso with your Street Shark’s head and marvel at the super creation you just made! Hypercharge: Unboxed follows this formula, but not to the extent of your childhood. You can swap heads, bodies, color schemes, and even gun skins that make up your characters’ product boxes. All skins at this point in time are fully obtainable from completing in-game actions. That’s right, NO MICROTRANSACTIONS! I feel like this is the first game in SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO long that hasn’t had micro-transactions, and it’s super refreshing.

Hypercharge: Unboxed features two main play styles. A PVE Campaign mode, where you battle waves of toys invading your base of operations, and the common meat-grinder multiplayer lobbies. The campaign can be played in online co-op, local co-op, and solo. In this mode, you are tasked to protect your power cores using defensive objects, like walls and traps, to slow the advance while you rain a bullet hell from above, or wherever you see fit.

Multiplayer is a different story altogether, and obviously, this is where you go to face off against real humans if you can find a lobby with them. In my time playing, I struggled to find full PVP lobbies, and instead found myself farming bots for kills. I’m unsure if this is due to the fact there may not be any OCE servers and I was battling against US players at like 3 am their time, or if the game is yet to receive the popularity it deserves. PVP modes lacked variety, with only 3 modes to choose from. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Infection. The current game modes were heavily kill-based and lacked any real objective. In further updates, I would love to see some Domination, Capture the Flag, and Escort. I feel these modes would add and evolve the replayability and immersion rates.

Hypercharge: Unboxed was a beautiful game to look at, with concise and epic-level designs, everything looked as if it had been created by someone plotting an epic battle for all toy-kind. Graphically, everything was set to 11 and I am unable to fault any of it. Running an AMD 5800X, 32GB RAM, and an Asus 3070TI, the game ran extremely smoothly with no hiccups or stutters. With everything set to max settings and at 1440P I averaged 350FPS while my PC had like 10 Twitch tabs up. Dropping the quality to low with the same things open, I averaged well over 500FPS. The game, with how hectic and stunning it is, was super well-optimized.

Even with graphics set to low the game still looked good. The only visual issues I encountered came back to an overly simple UI and menus. Sometimes I had no idea what gun I spawned in with. I would have to get into a fight to figure out what I was handling until I learned the different crosshair types, and I often got lost when navigating the multiplayer menus. The menus featured 3 or 4 sub-menus that at first had me very confused, and still, after my time in-game, I am not too confident when traversing them.

Hypercharge: Unboxed is the newest shooter to hit the scene, and the fresh concept, if given the chance, could take the FPS genre by storm. I have been watching the progression of Hypercharge: Unboxed closely over the last while, and with a few tweaks to UI and game modes, this could be something every arcade shooter fan has been waiting for.

Written by: Bigfoot