SHOUT OUT - Hypercharge: Unboxed has sold 100K copies on Xbox, and represents a second wind worth celebrating
Well ain’t that something nice.
By Jonathan Garrett
02/07/24
NOTE: thatHITBOX Shout Out’s are not sponsored content. They’re games, developers, individuals, or issues that we want to highlight and share purely out of interest.
Although it had already launched on Steam and Switch several years ago, it’s remarkable that Hypercharge: Unboxed is continuing to find a ravenous and renewed audience on a platform so synonymous with Day 1 subscription releases. The choice for it to not be included in Game Pass, and instead rely on the good will and ravenous demands of the community at large, proves the value of teams listening to their audience.
That’s not to say that we won’t see it pop up on PlayStation or Game Pass down the line; Hypercharge has already enjoyed a longer tail than most indie releases, which speaks volumes about its feature complete simplicity. At its core, it’s a toys come to life shooter, but presented in such a way that evokes the AA tier of titles that dominated the console space from decades past.
The takeaway is clear; there’s room for games of all shapes and sizes in this ever crowded industry. Smart pricing and snappy marketing can cut through the noise, so long as the fun is easy to find. Congratulations to the team at Digital Cybercherries (fantastic name) for all their hard work, and for persevering to bring this game to a wider audience.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
