Hyper-5 Review

Hyper-5 tells the story of the titular ship that has received a distress signal from a mysterious source requiring help in order to save planet 4GDT. You’ll go up against a plethora of various enemies and massive bosses across and, air and underwater in order to complete your mission.

Hyper-5 is a typical shump, a.k.a. shoot’em up, where players need to destroy and survive waves of enemies before reaching the boss of each level. You’re given a default weapon and missile attack. While the former has unlimited ammo, the missiles can be used once and need a cooldown period before being able to reuse them. Killing enemies and completing certain objectives (such as completing a level or killing X number of enemies) will reward players with UP which is in-game currency.

The currency can then be used to purchase new weapons and upgrades for your ship giving a layer of flexibility and customization so players can give their ship a personal touch so to speak and find the best weapon that suits their play style. Another different feature is that this game has a health bar, meaning no one-hit deaths! You can sometimes pick up additional temporary boosts and health items after killing enemies.

One thing that makes it stand out from most shmups is the fact that when playing “story” mode if you game over, you can continue playing from the level you died in instead of being thrown back to the beginning of the game. So it facilitates practicing the same level and learning enemies’ patterns easily and make it easier on yourself to a certain extent. Once you’ve conquered the story, you can tackle arcade mode where you can replay levels to complete challenges and earn additional UP.

The game looks great as a whole, especially the well-designed background. Each level design is uniquely made to represent a different type of area for variety and avoid level repetition. Hyper-5 also features a decent variety of enemies with upwards of forty types of threats. The contrast between backgrounds and enemies and their projectile is also done in a way to everything is distinguishable. The soundtrack, while fair and enjoyable, sounds like a generic, stock rock soundtrack with a flair of electro.

The game has two major flaws: the movements and the weaponry. The former is quite frustrating because it feels like you’re moving through mud; the ship feels slow and heavy and there’s also no quick dodge option to offer a bit more exhilaration and fun. The latter, well that’s a huge problem. Your ship’s attack feels completely useless. It barely does any damage to enemies you’re better off avoiding projectiles and waiting for the enemies to pass you by. Even with upgrades, some enemies will never die yet despite taking damage. And because of this, you need to grind to get enough in-game currency to upgrade your ship. It gets annoying pretty fast; shumps aren’t RPGs, and they shouldn’t require grinding.

Hyper-5 is easily one of the worst, most frustrating (not in a good way) shmups I’ve played. While it’s a decent feature to not have to restart the game every time you die, the ship feels like you’re flying through quicksand or molasse, the default weaponry makes it that it takes too many hits to kill enemies. Given these two major issues, which serve as the core of the normally intense, fast-paced experience of a shmup, Hyper-5 takes everything fun of the genre and makes it worst. Given the bevy of a better and more challenging shmup, Hyper-5 is an easy pass.