• Price: $7.99 USD (currently on sale for $6.79 until August 4th)
• Developer/Publisher: Vertex Pop
• Release Date: July 27, 2023

A review code was kindly provided by Mighty Yell Studios on behalf of Vertex Pop. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Vertex Pop, the developer behind games like WE ARE DOOMED, Graceful Explosion Machine, and Super Crush KO, has now brought HYPER METEOR to Nintendo Switch. It’s a game in which you are surrounded by enemies in space, and there’s some worse news: your weapons systems are down. Your only way of keeping yourself safe is to use your ship to ram into your enemies. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride!

The first thing I noticed as I started up the game was its catchy electronic music. I thought it was a nice complement to the gameplay. There are 4 game modes for you to choose from:

• Endless: survival mode with 3 lives
• METEOR: trigger explosions to get through a meteor storm
• Countdown: maximize your combo in 3 minutes
• Waves: 40 waves of enemies

The graphics are simple but effective; your ship is a little arrow cursor, and the “enemies” vary in shape and size. Their commonality is that you must only hit the shapes on their light side – hitting their dark sides results in losing a life. When you move around, you have to be careful not to accidentally bump into those sides, which can be difficult when going offscreen takes you or the enemy to the opposite side of the screen.

You start with 3 lives, but you’ll receive a handful of extra lives once your score reaches certain points. And your ship’s weapons systems may be down, but you do have a small amount of bombs to use sparingly (although you get a few more at the same time that you get extra lives). These bombs wipe out all enemies currently on the map.

At first, you can only play in Endless Mode. I was really excited to see that part of the game involves unlockables. With each “game over,” your score gets added to the points you earned in previous plays. You’ll unlock the other 3 game modes, new color palettes, different music tracks, and an extras section.

My scores started out pretty mediocre until I got used to the game. I wouldn’t say I’m amazing at it, but I found myself getting better with each play, which was incredibly satisfying. There’s also an achievements feature that shows how far you’ve come, and a stats section that you can unlock. I just loved making progress and unlocking new parts of the game even after making mistakes. Everything gets unlocked at 300,000 points.

It doesn’t matter which of the 4 game modes you play because they all add your scores to the unlockables gauge. I preferred Endless Mode for some reason, but of course I spent time with the other modes.

Meteor Mode has you bump into the light side of obstacles as usual, but here doing so breaks them down into either solid dark obstacles that you can’t destroy through the usual method, or explosives that you can bump into to destroy the solid dark enemies. This mode is harder than it seems.

Countdown Mode seems to give you unlimited lives, but it takes time for your ship to respawn. I think that was my second favorite mode. Wave Mode has you destroy 40 waves of enemies, which is challenging but also quite rewarding when you make it through all 40.

Your highest score in each mode gets placed on an online leaderboard. Other than that, there isn’t an online competitive mode, but the game does have local co-op for 2 players. In co-op you and another player work together to destroy the enemies, and you seem to share lives…? My Player 2 lost three lives in a row fairly quickly in their first attempt, but I was left standing with the last life.

I played in co-op with a family member, who said they enjoyed playing this with me. One thing we both had an issue with was keeping track of which ship was ours, so perhaps adding the ability to toggle Player 1&2 labels on and off would have helped there.

HYPER METEOR may not be the usual type of game that we play, but both of us had a good time with it. I think that it could work for amateurs like myself as well as the more skilled player who likes to challenge themself by beating everyone else’s scores (as well as their own).