Hyperwired

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Hyperwired is a 2-Stick Shooter with Roguelike elements released in 2026 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game has you flying a spaceship around an enclosed area, tugging along a power cord that you must plug into multiple plugs to complete each area.

It’s an interesting concept, and the plugs serve multiple purposes. First, they are the goal you must complete to move on through the game, and second, they’re necessary to refill your ship’s draining resources: your fuel, your ammo, your health, and so on.

Unfortunately, I feel like this wasn’t really full thought through in the execution of this game. For most levels, you can ignore most enemies and just rush from one plug to the next, and in fact you probably should because killing enemies doesn’t provide you with much benefit and they keep spawning… but then you have boss levels where you need to take out an enemy to progress, which completely shifts the game’s focus to something you’re not normally doing.

Also, the game’s randomized level design not only means you have to search every corner of levels sometimes, but the challenge of levels can be wildly inconsistent – you’ll have some levels with winding paths leading to nothing, and some levels where all of the plugs you need to join up with are bunched up in the same area.

This is extra-frustrating because your fuel runs out relatively fast if you don’t plug in, and yet the game’s very design forces you to explore areas that may have no plugs to search for something you may end up finding you desperately need but just traveled far away from.

I suppose I should mention that this game’s Roguelike elements feel underbaked and don’t have the sort of satisfying synergies you look for in the genre. What’s more, this game’s tutorial does a poor job of explaining its gameplay elements, leaving you wondering at times why something isn’t working the way it’s seemingly supposed to, very frustrating.

The presentation here is mostly decent with one exception. The game uses 2D visuals that are decent enough but don’t really have a lot of personality to them. It works, but isn’t especially noteworthy. However, that one exception I mentioned? It’s this game’s synthwave soundtrack, which absolutely rocks. I don’t have much in the way of examples to point to, but check out the Game Over theme for an example.

It’s frustrating that the game design in Hyperwired feels so lacking in cohesion, because the core concept has promise, and the soundtrack is phenomenal. But unfortunately, the game’s lackluster design makes this unsatisfying to play, and there are countless other better 2-Stick Shooters on Nintendo Switch.

tl;dr – Hyperwired is a 2-Stick Shooter and Roguelike where players tug along a power plug that they need to jack in to plugs throughout each of the game’s levels, both to recharge and to progress. While there are some interesting ideas here and an outstanding soundtrack, the game design lacks cohesion, resulting in frustrating gameplay that doesn’t life up to the concept’s potential.

Grade: C+

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