Hyper Scape

You’ve probably heard of it

The newest game riding the Twitch drop hype train, and quite possibly, the most confounding game I’ve ever played.

(Play music from hyperscape)

Ubisoft is notorious for releasing games in a state far below the quality of the reveal. Watchdogs, R6 siege, Assassin’s creed, you name it, it looked better in the trailer at E3.

But Hyper Scape is an interesting specimen. Prior to the closed beta’s release, I had never heard of this game. For me at least, I just popped up out of nowhere. After receiving a drop for the game and realizing it wasn’t available in my region, I decided to just forget about it. But now that the game is in OPEN beta worldwide… yeah, it’s strange.

 Hyper scape is a battle royale game, because money, and after playing just a few minutes of the main “crown rush” mode, I already had some thoughts. The game is still in beta obviously, but I can immediately see some hardcoded flaws with its design. The movement in Hyper Scape is akin to that of Apex Legends, with super speed sprinting, crouch sliding, and the addition of double jumps. This ridiculous level of mobility makes gunfights feel… unrewarding. Enemies are all over the place, jumping around like popcorn kernels in a… popcorn maker. But in this case the popcorn maker is covered in bounce pads, and the flailing pieces of popcorn are armed with rocket launchers and deagles!

This makes consistently hitting other players almost as hard as catching one of those popcorn kernels with a sewing needle filled with lead. (ok I’m done with this analogy). I also had a lot of ping issues but again the game is in beta and I’m sure those will be resolved.

My other issue with the game is visibility. Almost all parts of this map look nearly identical, at least while you’re actually playing, and is all one big city like in Spiderman. Like Spiderman, this makes the map pretty damn boring to look at. This is my opinion; however, the map’s mostly bland color palette is not only an aesthetical problem, but a gameplay one too. Default player models are dressed in this plain off white, here’s a view of the map, here is a default player, OH LOOK THEY HAVE THE SAME COLOURS OFF WHITE AND DARK GREY.

 It doesn’t take a genius to realise that this makes player visibility pretty hard, so its nice that players emit this red glow behind them as they run. This technique of glowing enemies has become very popular with movement heavy games in recent days, and I find it to be a cheap workaround for lazy visual design. Team Fortress 2 is a popular name when talking about this topic, and for good reason. Without the need for glowing red enemies or visible health bars above player models, you can instantly tell what class you’re looking at and what team they are on. This is because Valve put thousands of hours just into perfecting these silhouettes and colours. This is aesthetically and practically good visual design. THIS is… man I don’t even know what this is… Ubisoft themed Valorant?

So, there were a few things I did like about Hyper Scape. Only having two weapon slots make for interesting looting, combined with the ability to fuse together identical weapons to upgrade them and the punchy transitions between the waiting area and dropping into the map. The soundtrack is pretty standard, futuristic, bassy, but not off-putting. And overall the game seems to be technically fine, a rare praise for Ubisoft. There were a few bugs that I discovered myself but I don’t feel the need to discuss as it is a beta and bugs are being fixed all the time. Before I end off, I wanna mention a couple things I found weird and confusing about the game.

 The first time you start the game you materialize in this training ground, where you can test out the different weapons and mechanics the game has to offer before travelling to the main lobby. There are hardly any UI screens in this game, instead you walk around interactive menus, a lot like the creative lobbies in Fortnite. After playing a few games though, and getting very confused by some of the less conventional weapons found within the Hyper Scape map, I wanted to go back and test them out alone. So I spent nearly half an hour searching for a portal back to the training lobby just so I could figure out how the hell to play the bloody game (intense sigh). Here is a recreation of me finding it. (walks around, behind stairs, “what the f-“)

Also why does this guy stand here clutching his groin in silence for 15 seconds after I’ve been brutally eliminated?

Overall Hyper Scape Beta has some very strange design choices that so far have only made me hate popcorn kernels (shaking fist at popcorn)… oh and the game too. Yeah I don’t like this game. Perhaps when it’s finished I’ll enjoy it for what it is, but while reviewing Anthem, the great SkillUp once said :

SkillUp Cake Clip

 And I think that applies to the problems I had with hyper scape. Thanks for watching, and if you have any thoughts, remember – I’m not qualified to have an opinion either.