Hyper Bounce Blast Review

Hyper Bounce Blast on Steam is an interesting game from Flump Studios, featuring a mix of shmup and bullet hell twin stick shooters, with a bit of platforming. You dodge around the little arena as enemies come pouring in. The arena is a small area with lines denoting a sort of point threshold. The purpose of this is to bounce on certain enemies Super Mario style to kill them and in doing so you get higher up the scale and gain more points. You can only jump on the blue and green enemies. There are three colors of enemies with some variations. Red enemies can be shot, you bounce on blue enemies, and green enemies can be killed either way. This works and is easy to see among the bullets filling the screen. Now I said this is bullet hell and yeah bullets will quickly overwhelm and start to seem like a huge problem, but this isn’t the case here. Another twist on the formula is while bouncing you are almost invincible, you absorb bullets while bouncing and fill up a hyper meter. When this meter is full full you are able to unleash waves of destruction as your ship becomes an unstoppable force for a few seconds.

The shining moment is the bosses. These guys come with a warning showing you they mean business. When you encounter them you will notice they are a mix of blue and red parts. You blast away at the boss until you take out a portion of his health and then you will be given an opportunity to bounce on him doing some big damage. This is crucial and you only have a small window to see the trick and execute the attack. Missing this can mess you up for the whole fight. Presentation in the game is lacking a bit. Right from the menu you can see that it almost looks like a flash or mobile game. Going into the game it seems to borrow its looks from Geometry Wars but not as polished. The enemy designs are varied, doing a good job of showing which is stronger by shape and size. The music starts strong but slowly becomes grating as you start hearing the same tunes over and over. The levels do change of songs after a while but it seems that every boss shares the same themes. I did enjoy playing the game, and maybe it’s just that I’m not into the whole shmup, bullet hell type genre, but I found it to be a little repetitive. The best part was jumping on blue enemies and trying to stay in the air while taking out red guys at the same time.

The whole being invincible while bouncing takes away from the bullet hell frantic dodging. You get completely destroyed by a boss who will bombard you with bullets and leave you with nothing to bounce on. I did kind of like that about the bosses pulling the rug from under you leaving you helpless without your shield. But sometimes it’s a sudden change that can make you feel like it’s unfair. Overall I’d say it’s worth the five bucks they are charging and if you like shmups you may very well like this. This game is out on Steam right now so check it out if you get a chance.

Head here if you want to get the game to try yourself.