Hyperslice is an arena slice-em-up. Not an arena or twin stick shooter… It’s a slice-em-up. That is because the player never fires a bullet in this retro-futuristic styled roguelike with tons of unlockables to throw into the mix. Instead, you’ll use your ship’s body to dash and push your way through enemies and chop them up! It turns what could have been a standard arena shooter arcade title into something more visceral and explosive.
There are two ways to attack in Hyperslice. You can slice enemies, which will damage their health, and the dash that allows you to slice requires a very tiny recharge before you go again, leaving you vulnerable if you dash into the path of an enemy, their fire, or a giant bomb or meteor smashing into the arena. Most enemies are moving or chasing you, though, and that’s where the push comes in. The push doesn’t hurt an enemy (unless you buy that upgrade between waves), but it slams them across the arena and against a wall, stunning them for about a second and a half. During this time, you can then slice them up or push them again. Some enemies have shields that can only be deactivated by slamming them against the wall, so you’ll have to vary your tactics. You’ll also have an ultimate ability, which is different for each of the five ships in the game. Those five ships come with different speed, damage, and health stats, and it’s well worth unlocking them with in-game currency to see which one suits your playstyle best.
Whenever enemies die, they’ll leave behind gems for you to scoop up. This is the in-game currency to use every 3 or 5 waves during your 30-wave run. Full transparency alert: I haven’t beaten all 30 waves, but I’ve spent hours trying and feel I’ve got a good enough handle on most of the game to review it. The gems are used in two ways. Firstly, you can buy upgrades to your ship from three randomly generated upgrades from the list you’ve unlocked. These include movement speed, gem radius pull, the ability to recharge your ultimate ability when taking damage, and increasing the stun time for pushes. You can also buy new abilities in the shop, too. These include some game-shifting changes like wall slams causing damage, or slices having the chance to damage nearby enemies. Both of these are very helpful, alongside marking an enemy as a leader. That means you can take out the leader and all other enemies that spawned in the same mini-wave die with it. These all cost a lot of gems, though, so you won’t always be able to buy them all, especially if you can’t kill enemies at pace to keep your combo going.
The second use for gems is to store them at the shop on every 5th wave to then spend them unlock more of the 5 ships, 53 upgrades, and 27 abilities. I spent time doing that early on, to make the upgrades more varied, and honestly, more powerful, as the better ones are locked at the start of the game. As everything gets binned whenever you die in Hyperslice, it’s both a roguelite and a roguelike!
Movement is fluid, fast, and visceral, and each wave has a consistent enemy pattern, which makes the online leaderboard a true test of skill and might. Thankfully, the collision detection is near-perfect, too. Occasionally, I’d die and not entirely know what caused it, and that’s because sometimes there’s a lot going on in a small, ever-shape-shifting arena. Enemies are nippy and zippy, so they’ll catch you by surprise. Whenever I look at Hyperslice gameplay, I feel like it doesn’t quite convey the frog in boiling water approach to difficulty. It goads the player into a false sense of security and skill belief before swatting you like a fly with a tricky combo of enemies and hazards. Hyperslice is difficult, but it also feels fair, and that, alongside its heavy jungle soundtrack, keeps your pulse firing for another round. I did run into a couple of rare bugs, where I somehow managed to push or slice my way outside of the arena, leaving me stuck and unable to progress. It’s happened twice in many hours of gameplay, so it’s rare, but it happened on my best run, so I was a little bit miffed!
It didn’t stop me from hitting restart and trying again, though. Hyperslice is a visceral, aggressive, potent bomb of retro arcade gameplay and modern roguelike upgrades. The leaderboard and your high score beckon you back time and again as you perfect your skills on early rounds, and hope you’ve got what it takes to survive the later rounds or glitched rounds that offer a harder challenge for special rewards. Addictive and fun, don’t skip this little hidden gem.
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