Hyperlight Ultimate

Genre: Bullet Hell Shmup / Arcade

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Hyperlight Ultimate is an Arcade-style Shmup, albeit without the shooting. Instead, players will be using a dash attack to bash enemies.

This game’s presentation is a bit like that for Geometry Wars series, albeit without the polish. For those who haven’t played those games, that means a neon lines-on-black visual motif. That said, this game does incorporate larger “boss” enemies, so it has some stuff going for it too. It’s just a pity that the character designs seem a bit overly-complicated.

For the gameplay, while it’s a nice twist to bash into enemies rather than just shooting them, this formula is complicated by a few factors. First, controlling your character while dashing is frustratingly finicky, as you don’t go in a straight line and holding down the dash button automatically pushes you, making you feel less in control at the time you’re at you’re most powerful, which is frustrating.

Also, players cannot simply keep plowing into enemies, they need to collect fuel pickups to recharge, else they’ll be left helpless, and of course you’ll want to dash from pickup to pickup, which means that with the poor controls you could easily miss where you’re aiming.

In addition to this, the more complex enemy designs compared to Advance Wars makes it harder to instantly recognize enemies, and it’s at times not clear when you are and are not safe to dash into one of them. Supposedly you are invincible during a dash, but this proves to not always be the case, and figuring out when you are and aren’t safe becomes a matter of trial and error.

In the end, Hyperlight Ultimate is a game with an interesting approach to the Shmup genre, but one whose flaws outweigh its good qualities. Not a terrible game, but you can do better.

tl;dr – Hyperlight Ultimate is an Arcade-style Shmup where players bash into enemies with a charge attack instead of shooting them. It’s a good take on the formula, but unfortunately some design issues makes this more tedious and frustrating than it needs to be.

Grade: C

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