Reviewer's Note: Similar to my Rocket Arena review, I was given an extra review code for a friend.  I don't believe this gracious gesture did anything to influence my overall opinion, but it felt worth noting all the same.

Even if there were other examples before it, Pixar's Toy Story was a galvanizing moment of thinking about toys coming to life; not merely just pretending they were real, but intricacies of different movements and creative uses of their abilities.  From it to more militarized versions of this concept, a la Small Soldiers, there's a special draw in shrinking oneself down to this perspective and exploring the world, or perhaps fighting in it.  Leaning more towards the latter, Digital Cybercherries wanted to make the next big "toy soldiers" shooter.  After making a splash on Switch & PC during the early stages of the COVID pandemic, this humble six-man team has finally ported Hypercharge to Xbox.  How does it fare years out of its original packaging?

Unlike most other examples, there's an in-universe reason beyond magic as to why these toys come to life.  Their ancestors (so to speak) crafted a magical mini-brain in a jar, known as a Hyper-Core, which also retains a child's playful memories with them.  Over time, these devices were magically scattered among every child's household.  A pair of these children had two grizzled Max Ammo army men to play with, but one was left in his box as a collector's item.  As one would expect, envy drives him to escape his plastic cage, become Major Evil, destroy any hypercores in his path, and eventually be defeated.  While this quick victory settles the house for a time, something is amiss as new toys launch an assault across the house.

A basic good & evil setup, but it's a useful way of establishing the context for the single-player/co-op campaign's tower defense emphasis.  After a comic book animation establishing each arena – garage, bedroom, bathroom, etc. – you're thrusted into establishing defenses for the oncoming horde of possessed toys.  The arsenal at the beginning is rather straightforward: disruptive walls, annoying vines to slow speed, and spike traps; as time goes on, acquired Hypercharge cards (max of 3 per character) expand your combative potential with standard turrets, anti-aircraft turrets, improved mines, and so on.  The limits for said defense systems come in both where they can be placed and the high cost of certain equipment.  There's an immediate demand to explore in order to amass stalwart defenses. 

Hypercharge's best quality stems back to the verticality of its level design.  Since there's a time crunch in the prep phase before each wave, you're implicitly compelled to explore as quickly as possible.  Digital Cybercherries expands upon this with a plethora of main and secondary objectives for most maps.  Little challenges like going from point A to point B in a single bound or collectible hunting make you scour every nook and cranny.  There's a nice flow state between appreciating the fun shrunken-down scenario you're in and the various doodads you're discovering.  There's something to be said about maintaining a forward operating base atop your water heater and fortifying the hypercore glued on your parents' hatchback's roof.  To revive this 'ole game critic trope: it really makes you feel like a toy solider.

There's also a decent challenge thanks to its frugal economy.  Spending coins collected by fallen enemies, the surrounding world, or floating packs will typically leave you hurriedly searching for more stuff after each wave.  It's also important to weigh what to spend your limited resources on; for example, 1 leveled-up turret is the cost of roughly 4 leveled-up wall partitions.  Those turrets are such a draw for enemy bots to attack as well, so all that spending could be all for naught if destroyed.  Those little details around combat make this campaign more than a run-of-the-mill Horde Mode.

It's just a shame that the shooting mechanics feel so… plastic and bland.  The dynamics for so many weapons feel off-putting.  The slightly higher time-to-kill (TTK) makes sense with them shooting plastic guns, but the 'feel' of shooting never finds a good balance (even after adjusting sensitivity options).  Some of the arsenal like assault rifles and snipers are functional enough, but minute details like a missing oomph in sound design or dry reloads are universal.  Other examples are wild by comparison, like the insane vertical recoil of the mini-gun or overemphasized punch of each shotgun blast.  Even the fun of discovering different weapons or gun attachments on the battlefield falls flat because of the under-polished kinesthetics.

To its credit, there's a decent selection of enemies to face against.  Between standard bipedal robots, knockoff Boglins, plastic army paratroopers, discount Beyblades, and more, the team has done a great job of capturing the typical American suburban kid's collection come to life.  The problem unfortunately stems back to how all of the aesthetic differences don't lead to many tactics aside from shoot everything in your line of sight.  Granted, that's the modus operandi for most shooters, but what I'm driving at is how one-note its repetitive structure feels.  Melee and launching mines or grenades are options, but they don't really connect in a meaningful way.  The comfortable go-to is kiting while firing an auto weapon since that's the only reliable tactic.

With the mechanical baggage and without the strategic benefits, competitive multiplayer feels like the typical spawn/die cycles of any other shooter.  To its credit, there's a fair amount of modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Infection, Capture the Battery, and King of the Hill.  They all serve a useful function; and yet, I feel like I'm retreating back to the same feeling as XDefiant's blandness.  Once past the "playable toys" appeal, there's a missing x factor in keeping you consistently glued to the next match.  Whether by invisible walls or physically tweaking the space itself, most locales feel shrunken down to accommodate the max eight-player limit.  And though my overall online impressions weren't plagued with massive technical issues, one odd bugbear on Xbox is how selecting a server has been so unreliable.  I've only been able to connect to games via matchmaking, which sometimes won't bring up the mode I'd initially selected.

It's a shame to be harsh against it with such an impressive amount of content.  Past the aforementioned modes, there's also up to 4-player splitscreen, versus AI, and a surfeit of cosmetic selections for your character to emulate.  These choices include body variant, helmet type, gun skin color, armor color, avatar iconography, special nickname, and even the aesthetic of your action figure's packaging.  It captures the type of fusion between Build-A-Bear and G.I. Joe that I would've adored as a kid.  When looking purely through a number-crunching lens, this modest team easily clears the value expectations for a $30/$40 Complete Edition cost.

As much as I can admire the underutilized concept, Hypercharge: Unboxed still feels too plastic for its own good.  Although I admire the tenacity of such a small crew handling an impressive amount of content (single- and multi-player), there's always that danger of missing the bigger picture.  Given the surfeit of free-to-play and paid-for shooters coming down the pipeline, mediocre mechanics will always be a major red flag.  That's also in large part what leads its competitive multiplayer to feeling stale and tired compared to its better campaign-focused options.  It's hard to say how well genre fans will respond to such quality disparities for a middle-market shooter, but there's at least enough to enjoy before it gets buried at the bottom of the toy bin.

Contractor by trade and writer by hobby, Lee's obnoxious criticisms have found a way to be featured across several gaming sites: N4G, VGChartz, Gaming Nexus, DarkStation, and TechRaptor! He started gaming in the mid-90s and has had the privilege in playing many games across a plethora of platforms. Reader warning: each click given to his articles only helps to inflate his Texas-sized ego. Proceed with caution.