HYPERVIOLENT Review — A Retro Shooter in the Style of Classic DOOM

Right at the start, I blew myself up on a gas canister. I hadn't even figured out what to pick up or where to go yet, but I already knew what to stay away from. Later on, those same canisters turn out to be great for blowing up enemies.

Before that, HYPERVIOLENT had already thrown plenty of cutscenes at me. Somewhere out in space, another disaster has hit a mining station on an asteroid. We answer the distress call and end up stuck among people who went through something very bad. Some ancient evil woke up in the mines. After the intro, you're free to roam, and for a while I just picked up whatever I found — guns, a flashlight. At least with that, you can see where you're going.

You piece together what happened from logs. You pick up someone else's device, read it, and slowly put together why there are monsters on the station and what made its crew start killing each other. I didn't get the whole story right away, and every new gun I found was an easy distraction from reading.

At some point, a severed human arm turned up among the available weapons. You can pick it up and fight with it. I'd already been lugging around a metal pipe by then, so the very idea of clubbing someone with a found limb amused me.

Weapon selection is set up in an interesting way. You scroll the mouse wheel and a menu pops up showing what's in your inventory. You pick an item and press the left or right mouse button, depending on which hand you want to hold it in. That way you can carry two different guns at once. I quickly started cycling through my finds and trying out combinations. If nothing fits, there's always your fists and a kick.

There's no shortage of guns: everything from pistols to a machine gun, plus a shotgun and semi-autos. You can find more games like this in our list of the best FPS games on PC and consoles. Enemies constantly drop something, so you rarely walk around empty-handed for long. At one point I even got my hands on a Neuroteth-99. But the joy of another new gun quickly runs into the limits of your inventory.

There's already a pile of weapons in there. A lot of weapons. Some are out of ammo, some you still can't bring yourself to toss, and every kill drops something else you want to grab. You stop and start sorting through all of it — dump the empties, pick up the new stuff, check whether you've still got ammo for whatever else you planned to use. Healing items are handed out generously too. None of that makes more room.

You can find ammo for some of the guns, and there are upgrades plus the option to repair broken weapons. I even modded a shotgun. But more often than not it came down to the same loop: pick up a gun, burn through its ammo, drop it. Then dig through the inventory again. You have to get used to this, because you keep coming back to it.

Reloading, though, took me a while to get used to. You press R — nothing happens. You have to empty the magazine and then fire once more for the gun to reload. The game is also out on consoles, and the scheme might work better with a gamepad. I played on PC, and my finger kept reaching for R out of habit — especially with something still alive standing in front of me.

You reach a terminal. There's a login, no password. Time to search the area for a body carrying the device with the data you need. Exploring abandoned stations is something you'll also do in other games from our list of the best space games on PC. Nothing too demanding is asked of you — just check everything carefully. Then you type the password in by hand.

I finally found the right log, opened the reader and sat there trying to get through it. The text kept scrolling down, reached the edge, and then stopped. The password was right at the cutoff point of the visible area. I got lucky — it was still just barely legible, though I had to squint. Unpleasant to think that getting past it came down to how a few lines happened to line up in the window.

Orientation takes some fiddling too. There's no map, so you memorize the corridors yourself. A red keycard, a yellow one, a blue one — you find another and try to remember where its matching door was. The classic Doom games had a similar system; you can read more about the series in our ranking of the Doom games. After a password run or another round of sorting your inventory, it's not so easy to remember where you were headed.

Sometimes the game does give you a hint about where to go: a red exclamation icon shows up. I'd occasionally spot it through a wall. I never figured out whether it's meant to show through to grab your attention or if that's a bug. Either way, it's at least some kind of lead.

I liked the pixel-art enemies set against blocky, three-dimensional rooms. In the dark, flashlight in hand, I'd occasionally stop just to take in where I'd ended up. Fans of a grim atmosphere should check out our list of the best horror games. The monsters also behave differently from each other, and one particular type kept running away from me for some reason.

The big, fat mini-boss, on the other hand, clearly wasn't going anywhere. I pumped a ton of ammo into it, emptied several guns, and kept on firing. Beating it earned me a shotgun.

Sometimes the music would kick in ahead of time, making it clear a wave of enemies was about to show up. I liked it, and I'd already started reacting to that cue — checking what I had in my hands. I just wish I could stop hitting R in those moments too.

There'd been a temperature icon sitting next to the health bar the whole time. For a long while I barely paid it any attention — it showed something, presumably mattered somehow. Then I activated the core and got too close. The meter shot up and I started burning. Had to back off. Finally found out what that icon was there for!

HYPERVIOLENT is a retro shooter that’s more fun during firefights than in the lulls between them. The variety of weapons keeps you coming back for more, although navigating the environment and managing your inventory regularly slow down the pace. The game is best suited for those who enjoy experimenting with their arsenal and are willing to piece together the story from the notes they find.