Gaming
Hypercharge resembles a cross between Small Soldiers and Toy Story and has climbed Steam's charts after a week of virality.
Every so often, a game finds a newfound jolt of interest well after its release date. Among Us is perhaps the best recent example, but now Hypercharge, a shooting game in which players fight off waves of enemies as an action figure, is making a claim for the mantle after initially releasing in April, 2020 for Switch and PC.
Hypercharge was developed by just five people and was inspired by Counterstrike 1.6, Small Soldiers, Toy Story, and a general passion for action figures. Despite launching a little over two years ago, the game is tailor-made to be clipped, and a number of these clips have gone viral over the past few months, leading to a renewed interest in the title.
Things really started to take off for Hypercharge this month after Jake Lucky, an eSports commentator, promoted the indie game (a clip he posted has been viewed 13.6 million times) after interviewing one of the project’s devs. It has since climbed into Steam’s top-selling titles and is being marked down by 15 percent over the next two days.
As Kotaku pointed out, a lot of the recent clip-sharing has been part of a marketing campaign to drum up interest for the game’s release on Xbox, and accordingly frame the enticing shooter as a new release. Over Twitter, the official Hypercharge account also noted that there is an intention to bring the game to PlayStation as well.