Hexapoda Review

Hexapoda puts players in the proverbial shoes of a young hothead pilot who was hired by a team of scientists left behind on planet Earth. The scientists are looking for ways to bring humans back to the surface of the planet and this is where you come in; they need your help to figure out the best way to save the human race.

Hexapoda is another entry in the long running shoot’em up, a.k.a. shmup, genre where players (up to four of them) need to survive the game’s levels by dodging projectiles and killing everything in your way. As with any other games of the genre, you’ll also be able to pick up a handful of power-ups for additional firepower such as bounce, wave shots or laser for example. You also have a screen clearing bomb in case you get in a bad situation. Bombs also wipe out enemy projectiles. As you kill enemies, you’ll also pick up additional bombs and lives.

While power-ups are of limited use, you can also pick up upgrades to increase the firepower of your default weapon. Venturing solo lets you choose one of four ships. Each vehicle has a default attack; which is a power-up pick up for another ship. To explain clearly, the bounce balls is a pick up for ship 1, but is ship 2’s default attack. In an interesting twist, if playing solo, you can swap ship at any time in the pause menu.

Another interesting tidbit is the levels have branching paths; the game offers a total of three different endings. While levels are fairly challenging, they are fairly balanced overall. But things do ramp up pretty steeply during boss battles. It’s literally a blink and die situation. Boss or not, when you die, you have a few seconds to pick back up the power ups you had amassed until then.

The game features a black and white aesthetic where everything, projectiles aside, is in black and white, which is a nice change from the overly colorful games, shmup or not. It also makes things easier when trying to see and dodge enemy projectiles. The soundtrack, composed by a dude dubbed Double Dragon, is a decent, albeit forgettable, synthwave inspired score.

While there’s nothing majorly wrong, there are a few nuisances. So one of the problems here is the initial loading of the game. It takes longer for this indie to load than it is to boot up and jump into a fight in Tekken 8. Additionally, it occurred a few times; when starting playing the game’s first level, there was no music playing and going into the menu crashed the game.

Hexapoda is a great entry in the shmup genre. Not only does provide a decent challenge for hardcore fans of the genre thanks to its Hard and Manic difficulty modes, but Normal difficulty is perfect for newcomers. Once the game is booted, the gameplay is addicitive and solid. The small diversity of power-ups is fun to use and this can be played up to four players local co-op! Whether you’re returning to the genre or a newcomers, Hexapoda is a no brainer.