Hypercharge: Unboxed Review

Hypercharge: Unboxed is an indie first and third-person shooter featuring action figures that blend the grit of the Army Men game series and the charm of the Toy Story films from Pixar. Coming from British indie studio Digital Cybercherries, it introduces this interesting premise to the Xbox Series X, as it was previously released on Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.

We follow the missions of Sgt. Max Ammo and his motley group of action-figure soldiers as they lead a heroic campaign to topple Major Evil, a former action figure that once led a campaign against Sgt. Max Ammo and his cohort using evil toys to capture the Hypercore.

Will you and your team slow the advance of this hostile takeover or will you lead them to victory? Build that base, toy soldier, and get into the world of Hypercharge!

The Toys Are Alive!

Starting out with Hypercharge really gives a really strong Grounded vibe, with a quirky story about how action figures come alive and wage wars against each other. It’s a pretty entertaining premise that’s charmingly told largely in comic book panels and immerses into its world.

Each of Hypercharge’s 14 missions begins with Sgt. Max Ammo briefing one of the many action figures about to sortie into the mission. They range from comical to semi-serious, but it is a sequence to look forward to when beginning a mission… at least on your first encounter with the level.

Each level is an enlarged map featuring normal rooms in the household including a child’s room, the bathroom, and in later levels, a hardware store and a toy store. The level designs are creative and are quite nifty. There are creative ways developers have designed ways to traverse the exaggerated levels, and it gives you this ant’s eye perspective seen in games like Grounded.

The gameplay loop in Hypercharge is quite simple: the build and explore phase and the base defense phase. The build and explore phase is self-explanatory, as players will have three hypercores to protect, each having their defensive perimeter, and highlighted in three different colors: red, blue, and green.

Players can fortify the perimeter with walls, obstacles, and traps to slow down enemy advance. Each construct has a durability meter, and traps, like the sticky and explosive traps, have their way of slowing down said advance.

When you’ve completed building your base, you can use the remaining time during this phase to explore each of Hypercharge’s 14 creative levels. You can collect credits to build your base and purchase an arsenal for your character. You can also find batteries to power each Hypercore’s generators. When you have the time, you can even collect collectibles and complete challenges.

The base defense phase is also as straightforward. Each of the 14 missions in Hypercharge has different waves of enemy combatants attempting to disable each one of your Hypercores. With this, each enemy has their own way of attacking your base. You have your typical infantry that either attack close range or fire projectiles, but you also have aerial enemies that attack from the air.

Each action figure starts with a standard firearm and you can upgrade that by purchasing weapons or upgrades during your build phase. Some enemies such as tops are more susceptible to shotgun damage, while some enemies can be sniped from afar with a sniper rifle. Upgrades can improve spread and ammo capacity, which can help you be more efficient in your defense.

Certain missions have boss enemies during the final wave. They either attack alone or in tandem with enemy waves. Depending on your team strategy, you can topple this boss with your strategy or if you’ve built up enough resources, you can defeat them in a show of force.

The Fog of (Toy) War

Hypercharge gives you a choice of which perspective to pick, and I prefer the first-person perspective. While some players may prefer the third-person perspective, I like that you’re given a choice on what to select. That being said, the traversal of each level feels polished and easy to pick up. It’s quite simple to be able to traverse even the harder-to-reach areas, and if you require more assistance, there are areas where you can build springs to vault you over certain areas.

While each level creates an illusion of space, most levels are small enough to explore during one build phase. Personally, this is convenient especially when you want to complete as many of the challenges as fast as you can. However, it dampens the exploration bit, especially in a single-player setting where you want to get as much novelty out of each level.

Each level on a single-player setting loses its novelty quite fast, especially on normal and easier difficulties. Base upkeep is quite quick to fix after each wave and by the second or third wave, there’s really nothing else to do but complete challenges in each level. I would say that higher difficulties would give you more to do in terms of base upkeep and character upgrades as each build phase gets boring quite fast.

Hypercharge could offer more fun playing with other players, either in couch co-op or online play. In our review, I mostly played single-player, and during the later levels, tedium set in quickly. Repeating levels with more enemy unlocks gives you more of a challenge as each level opens up to more objectives especially when you’re defending the base against formidable enemies.

Generally, your “unlock” run of the game during your first experience will be really slow. It’ll take about 7-8 hours to complete your first phase of the game as each level will take between 20-30 minutes to complete because of the long build phase sequences. The waves quickly finish once you wipe the board of enemies.

There is a lot of replay value with Hypercharge with the many unlocks that you can complete. Each character has different skins for their characters as well as their weapons, and it’s fun to try out different loadouts to see how they affect enemies. There are different ways to set up your defense with the traps and constructs.

Sadly, momentum is hampered by the long build phases and the straightforward enemies on the first try. I’m afraid that by the time momentum has picked up with all the unlocks, the player would be bored to go reap the rewards of their labor. Play with friends, at least the banter will keep you entertained.

Verdict: Wait For It…

Hypercharge: Unboxed has an interesting premise that can quickly onboard you into its creative world. However, it is best to explore it with friends because the single-player experience is limited by your co-op AI, and many items have yet to be unlocked, proving to be a slow start. There’s definitely a lot of fun to be had playing with friends to coordinate creative base builds and coordinated attacks, so this is certainly the way to go.

Your level of enjoyment with Hypercharge is how much you put into it, but by the time you’ve unlocked many of its features, the tedious single-player game will have reached a breaking point. I speculate that the five-minute allowances given to players to build and explore really will come alive once the difficulty is upped with more enemy unlocks and players racing to complete their character build.

If you have a dedicated player base who will play with you via online play or couch co-op, there’s a lot of potential in Hypercharge. As a single player attempting to find novelty with this game, momentum dies down pretty fast in between game skirmishes.

*Hypercharge: Unboxed was reviewed on an Xbox Series X with a review code provided by the publisher.