HYPERCHARGE Unboxed is a four-player horde shooter and online PVP title that lets you control action figures fighting other toys. It’s competent, it’s pretty, and it’s unbelievably boring.
Conveying its basic story through a comic book style, still images being panned over as cutscenes, HYPERCHARGE Unboxed’s story is immediately forgettable. Generic names, weak voiceovers, and annoyingly goofy music play as you go from one horde level to another. There are 14 of them in total and while they have a nice variety of the locales on offer the base gameplay barely changes throughout the entire experience.
At the start of each round, you will jump, double-jump, and climb around the environment to get coins. These coins give you points to build up to three different types of fortifications. Levels are real-life-inspired locations where kids would play with their toys. You, as a toy-sized character, feel tiny and it’s the best part of the game. Graphically it all looks rather nice and you’ll spend a few minutes either with bots or up to 3 friends as you place your chosen defenses and/or look for weapon upgrades and secrets.
Once you put your build mode down it’s time to fight off multiple waves of enemies and after the first wave, I knew I was going to struggle to get through this one. There’s nothing bad here. Not a single part of this game is done poorly, it’s just never good or great either. Playing on a Series X, the controls rely heavily on magnetizing you to enemies instead of having proper aim acceleration. Again it’s not awful but it is stiff and no matter how much I tried to change things it never felt “good”.
Customization is a big part of the experience. You can change your toy’s appearance and will have to work for specific goals in each level to unlock it all. It’s a solid carrot on a stick and the art style on the toys, while again generic, looks nice and clean. Enemy variety again is fine. There isn’t a ton of it but just enough to keep things interesting as you play through. The Beyblade-inspired enemies are some of the most frustrating I’ve played in a shooter, and the game features a lot of flying enemies and your default weapon isn’t accurate enough.
One of my main gripes with the game is how whenever you use an iron-sight nearly everything becomes ridiculously out of focus. I found myself hip-firing more often than not because I couldn’t see shit when I held down the left trigger to gain a little zoom. During each match, you’ll gain currency after killing enemies and finding coins. You’ll use that to buy defenses, fix broken defenses, or buy weapon upgrades. If you die mid-match you need to go back and find that weapon or all of those upgrades are lost and it is infuriating.
Multiple defenses feel completely useless as well. I built a little plastic box fortification that was meant to let me shoot enemies from safety. The height of the area to see through was too low in either first or third person (changed by pressing the B button) and enemies just flew around it and shot me in the ass repeatedly. On the PvP side of things I was able to get a few games in against a handful of opponents and it wasn’t bad, again it was just too generic and boring. Perhaps on PC, the game plays well enough to feel intense. On console, the aim assist just means you need to vaguely get your reticle near something and it’ll lock on to them like an old OG Xbox or 360 title.
Graphically, when it is in focus, the game looks great. The art design on the toys and the look of the levels evokes tons of nostalgic feelings. There’s enough variety in locations, enemy types, and especially customization options for your character that I could see a completionist needing 20 to 30 hours to get it all. Audio-wise the voice acting is bad Saturday morning cartoon level, which I guess they might have been going for at their budget level. I’m not a fan of goofy music so it wasn’t for me at all. If you don’t mind it again it’s just well done enough to sound ok in the end.
Wrapping Things Up
I think HYPERCHARGE Unboxed’s biggest strength has been its marketing over the years. They’re not going for some live service title that is your forever game. The base game is $30 and if you have friends to play with you’ll get a week or two of fun out of the campaign as you try to unlock everything. It’s never bad, it’s never great, it’s fine.
HYPERCHARGE Unboxed
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Looks Great
- Tons of customization options
CONS
- Controller aim feel is off
- Didn’t vibe with the audio
- Repetitive campaign
It should be in game pass for boosting player numbers at launch. It’s crossplay with PC and Switch I guess ?
was somewhat intrigued, but I saw that it was a coop game, so I had to pass.
Oh no no, I was hoping this would be a hit!
But then again, Windows Central seems to love it and I saw another glowing review. Long story short, a demo now would help a great deal.
Windows Central probably only played the PC version
There’s a face I haven’t seen in a looooooooooong ass time!
As for the review. I haven’t read both reviews fully yet but I saw “boring” in the first parts of the review and that’s never a good thing. I’m gonna check both out.
Xbox review.
Others seem to like it more than me, make sure to read reviews from those you trust! A 6.5 for us isn’t “bad” it’s “fine”. We try to use the entire range of ratings.
Yeah, true. What someone might love isn’t necessarily how I will experience it, and vice versa. Gonna watch some more gameplay on it. Man, if only they provided a demo.
I really like the concept, unfortunately it is outside my wheelhouse (not big on horde or PVP).
I suspect the gameplay won’t be for me but I preordered it just for the Toy Story memories - I was obsessed when I saw it as a kid and this feels like a fun trip down memory lane