Hypercharge: Unboxed Review – Breaking the Plastic Box

Hypercharge: Unboxed is an indie project turned full-fledged video game released by Digital Cybercherries, a small team of friends based in the UK, that wanted to create a co-op shooter based around the Small Soldiers movie style, with action figures breaking out of their packages to wage war in every location possible, from the toy shelf to the bedroom. Did the team create the best indie non-live-service game of the year? Let’s burst forth from the plastic bubble and find out in our Hypercharge: Unboxed review.

Name: Hypercharge: Unboxed
Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One, & Xbox Series X/S (reviewed)
Developer: Digital Cybercherries
Publisher: Digital Cybercherries
Game Type: First-person shooter/Third-person shooter
Mode(s): Single-player, multiplayer
Release Date: May 31, 2024

Hypercharge: Unboxed: Small Soldiers, Big World (Story)

There isn’t much to the story of Hypercharge: Unboxed. The story is told through a series of comic books that appear at the start of each level in the campaign mode, detailing the adventures of two action figures: Max Action and Max Damage. Max Action is a standard army action figure played with by the boy he was given to, experiencing all sorts of adventures. Max Damage, on the other hand, is a special edition action figure that remains on the shelf in his box.

Max Damage becomes jealous of Max Action, wanting to go on adventures too. After all, action figures are meant to be played with, not kept in boxes. (Tell that to all the action figures I have still mint on card, mint in box, etc., in my personal collection.) Max Damage escapes his plastic prison and attacks a mythical object called the “Hyper-Core,” which allows children to keep their best memories of their childhood toys.

By attacking this object, Max Damage is hit with some strange power, mutating him into a melted, empowered form. He adopts the new name of Major Evil and wages war on all the other toys while recruiting toys for his cause. Max Action and his troopers take up arms to defend the Hyper-Cores from Major Evil.

There’s not a huge story to Hypercharge: Unboxed, but it provides just enough context to justify a video game where action figures fight against each other in the human world without being seen all the time. Think Toy Story mixed with Small Soldiers.

Plastic Is Fantastic (Graphics)

To say that Hypercharge: Unboxed captured the look and feel of the world from the point of view of an action figure would be to describe perfection, which is exactly what they have achieved here. Honestly, the level of detail in each location used in this game rivals that of Hot Wheels Unleashed. Yes, Hypercharge: Unboxed looks that good.

Each location has a lot of clutter, just like it would in the real world. When you are in the Toy Shop, which is used for the tutorial, you push free of your plastic blister bubble and immediately see rows of other toys, many of them having knock-off style names of popular brands, as well as boxes waiting to be opened on dollies all over the place. This one location feels like a scene out of Toy Story, specifically Big Al’s Toy Barn.

Other locations have their own “lived-in” appeal. When you fight in the bedroom, you see that the kid is a gamer, with a setup on their desk: an RGB keyboard, multi-monitors, boxes of other toys on shelves, puzzles still in their boxes, and posters on the walls (a favorite of mine is the Jurassic Park knock-off called “Big Scary Things”). When you go into the bathroom/laundry room, you’ll encounter moments where you can flush the toilet, or fall into it, along with the washing machine, the bathtub, and other parts of the level.

All of these levels, as well as many others, give you a sense of what it would be like to be a toy in a larger-than-life world that we would consider mundane. As a toy, you can go through things, behind things, under things, and see parts of each room that we do not get to see without a lot of hassle.

I’ve also got to give praise to the action figures themselves. Each figure, which you can customize, can look like anything you might remember from lines like G.I. Joe, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Dinosaurs, Fantasy, and other settings that you would have seen in your local Toys R Us back in the day. These legally distinct figures look amazing as they shine against the light while you run around shooting other toys over and over again.

Hypercharge: Unboxed: Clear Plastic Syndrome (Gameplay)

Hypercharge: Unboxed is a game of two very different styles. The Campaign is ok but repetitive, while multiplayer is frantic and fantastic. Allow me to explain further:

The campaign is a single-player or local co-op wave shooter. You start each round collecting gold coins or packets of coins to afford building defensive items like traps, walls, turrets, and other structures before the wave begins. Each wave sends enemies ranging from basic robots, zombie robots, spinning ‘we won’t call them Beyblades’ tops, exploding ‘mad balls,’ and huge hulking devastators (with more to come!). The idea at this stage is to team up with either other players or bots to take them down in the third or first-person perspective. The opponents’ objective is to destroy three ‘Hyper-Cores,’ and yours is to defend them… and that’s it.

As I mentioned above, the levels in the campaign range from a bedroom, kitchen, backyard, toy aisle, and other locations where a child would have played with action figures during their childhood. However, with the objective being the same time and time again, Hypercharge: Unboxed campaign comes off as the last thing the developers wanted to add to the game.

Multiplayer, or online modes, are where the real action is.Hypercharge: Unboxed brings chaotic mayhem to modes like Deathmatch, King of the Hill, Capture the Battery, and ‘Plague.’ Most of these modes play like the standard versions they are known by. Deathmatch has you taking on other players in a ‘get as many frags as you can’ mode. King of the Hill sees you controlling a specific area as much as possible. Capture the Battery is a Capture The Flag mode. Plague is the most interesting mode, where a randomly picked player as the ‘infected’ must infect other players without being killed. It’s a lot of fun, to be honest.

What makes these modes even more appealing is that you can play with up to 8 players online or in something I’ve personally wanted to return for years: you can play with up to 4 players in a local couch co-op split-screen mode that feels like the old-school GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 days.

Both modes come with the usual assortment of weapons, ranging from blasters to shotguns, sniper rifles, flamethrowers, and other fun guns that can be upgraded with attachments like advanced scopes, radars, stocks to increase accuracy, and more. This gives you a great assortment of weapons to use, with the ability to change things up on the fly being a great addition to the game.

From the Toy Shelf to the Bedroom, and Beyond! (Replayability)

I hate to say it, but Hypercharge: Unboxed feels like it gives you everything it can and comes off so good that you want more. However, the limited locations, the campaign mode focusing on wave defense, and the multiplayer being the true focus hurt the game more than they hype it up.

After a few rounds of the campaign mode and a few dozen waves in, you will sit back and wonder if that is all that Hypercharge: Unboxed can give you in a single-player sense, and it is. This comes off as half-hearted, as so many other modes in the multiplayer section could have lent themselves to the single-player mode to keep things fresh and exciting. There were only so many times I could play with the very well-scripted AI bots before I wanted to completely give up on the campaign.

Online, things take a different turn. People are either quick to set things up, giving you no time to get used to the map layout, or will skip the build phase completely and want to rely on just the players to defend everything themselves. Thankfully, there is no in-game chat, or else I’m sure it would be filled with people screaming or trolling each other at high volumes.

That being said, the online games are quick and easy to join, with a matchmaking mode that works extremely well in placing you into games with other players of the same skill level. Given that I waited an extra day to allow for the rush of people to come online on days one and two, this helped improve my impressions of the online gameplay, as the servers were pretty much dead during the media preview sessions.”

No Accessories Needed (Extras)

The last major thing I want to talk about regarding Hypercharge: Unboxed is something that should be common in gaming these days but, sadly, is not. Hypercharge: Unboxed is a game that has been promised to be 100% free of microtransactions, season passes, and possibly even DLC.

The developers wanted to create a game where everything is unlocked through progression, by completing challenges or finding secret unlockable medals. Given how many items are available to customize your action figure, I’m hopeful that this remains the case. However, I would like to see some free DLC that adds more locations to the game in the future, or if not free, then at least affordable.

There are some seasonal collectibles that become available at specific times of the year, such as Christmas and Halloween, but there is no season pass, no battle pass, and no other requirements needed to unlock these things. You need to be playing at the right time of year to unlock them.

This gives me hope that there are still some developers out there who understand that gaming is meant to be about having fun and making players happy. Unlike most other developers and publishers who treat gamers as walking wallets to be drained of money in ways that are worse than your landlord raising the rent on their investment property because they are greedy cu… Sorry, I got carried away there.

 

Hypercharge: Unboxed: More Manufacturing Needed (Closing)

Hypercharge: Unboxed suffers from being too good for its own good. What I mean by this is that the game is everything Digital Cybercherries promised and more, leaving you with high expectations and a desire to play through it as much as possible to unlock everything and get good at the game.

This leaves you with a sense of ‘this is everything,’ and that the game has nowhere to go but down. Being a game that wants to push for online multiplayer, the servers are likely to dry up sooner than people expect since once you unlock everything, there is nothing planned for the future.

Hypercharge: Unboxed is undoubtedly going to be one of the indie games of the year, but by this time next year, people will forget about the game unless Xbox puts it on Game Pass for the long term, giving players a ‘free’ game that will keep them engaged for a time, but not a long time.”

Review Disclosure Statement: Hypercharge: Unboxed was provided to us by Digital Cybercherries for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more information.