Developer: Flump Studios
Publisher: KISS ltd
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Hyper Bounce Blast – Review
Hyper Bounce Blast is Flump Studios’ latest love child. It mixes a whole lot of genres together in one crazy mashup and it’s surprisingly good at it as well. Get ready to play this retro shoot-em up with platforming elements, where patience, skill and reflexes mean everything.
Story
Just like many indie arcade-like games, Hyper Bounce Blast doesn’t have any story to it whatsoever. You just get into the game, follow the short introduction while you play and you’re off. There isn’t really any need for a story element in a game like this anyway because it would simply make no sense.
Graphics
The graphics in Hyper Bounce Blast look pretty retro. You can compare the sprites of enemies with old Space Invaders sprites, where the enemies are just simple outlines, not fancy animated sprites in any way. The background is mostly very dark but can sometimes have an extremely subtle animation, however it’s nothing that can disturb from the gameplay in any way.
However, it does seem very much the case that a lot of the graphical assets or inspirations have been taken from Flump Studios’ previous game: Horizon Shift. A lot of elements in the game look and feel extremely similar which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but for some it could feel like different gameplay pasted into the old game and resold as a new title.
Sound
Sound wise, Hyper Bounce Blast does pretty much everything the right way. The sound effects are there but not overwhelming and the music is simply awesome and fits perfectly with the fast-paced feeling of the game. In total, there are six different music tracks that blast while playing. Each and every one of them sound great and are just a blast to play the game to.
Gameplay
Hyper Bounce Blast is a pretty simple game at its core. It’s basically a mashup between an arcade game, a shoot’em up game and a platformer. It sounds pretty complicated, but it actually makes for some pretty interesting (and sometimes frustrating) gameplay. You play the game by moving left or right, jumping, shooting and using your bomb. Combine all this with a high pace, great music and hard levels and you’ve got yourself a fairly difficult game.
The basic concept of the game is pretty easy at first, but gets harder as you progress through the waves of enemies. Your ship is simply a wheel with a little yellow hitbox inside of it, if anything hits that you’ll lose a life, it’s a simple one hit kill. In order to make things more doable, the game features jumping. This can come in play to dodge bullets, but there are also blue platforms or enemies that can be jumped on and bounced off of. While bouncing from enemy to enemy, your ship is invulnerable to damage until it hits the bottom of the room again. This technique makes it basically a platformer as well as a shoot’em up because you have to be moving from platform to platform while in the air whilst also shooting the enemies.
So blue enemies can be jumped on and not harmed by bullets, then there’s the red enemies which obviously have to be shot down. There are also green enemies which appear once every wave, killing these successfully will award extra score. Bosses are usually both red and blue. First you have to shoot them and when they’re hurt you have a chance to jump on top of them to deal critical damage.
Another reason to jump on enemies is the “bounce multiplier”. The room you play in is divided by a couple of horizontal lines, and the higher you go, the bigger score multiplier you’ll get while killing enemies at that line. At the bottom the multiplier is one but it can go up to five, providing much needed score as score is needed in order to use your bomb/screen clear.
Hyper Bounce Blast has a total of six game modes. There’s the Arcade Classic where you start with two lives and work your way up the waves, with checkpoints before and after every boss. Then there’s Arcade Arrange, which gives you no lives but gives checkpoints after every level. There’s also the Time Rush where you start with two lives, a fully upgraded ship, and a game speeding up every time you clear a wave. Then there’s Tournament Mode which gives no lives, a fully upgraded ship and 200% game speed. Then there are two other game modes which have to be unlocked as you play.
Conclusion
All in all, Hyper Bounce Blast looked like a very promising game and it definitely paid off in the end. All of the elements in the game fit well together, from the gameplay with weird mixed genres to the music which is simply awesome. The game starts off friendly and easy, but it gets extremely hard as you go, up to the point of frustration.
Hyper Bounce Blast - Review,
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