Hyperspace Dogfights Review

Who remembers Thrust II on the ZX Spectrum?

Oh, some of you weren’t born then, damn it.

Thrust was one of the most frustrating games of my existence. You played a little rocket, which was continually fighting against gravity, and with limited fuel. You had to steal some orb thingy from a landscape which could include all sorts of caves and stuff, and then escape, while at the same time avoiding gun turrets and other nasties.

Basic stuff. Damn hard to play. Very frustrating.

At first glance, there was something very familiar about Hyperspace Dogfights, and that was the gravity and physics: you’re being pulled down all the time, so a fair amount of your time has to be spent tracking the ground, and you need to be thrusting upwards (fnar) enough to keep up. That’s sadly where the similarity ends.

I think it’s fair to call Hyperspace Dogfights “frenetic”. There’s a nice punchy tune in the background, which doesn’t let up, and in general FUCKING HELL, MY EYES. It’s one of many 8-bit pretenders which seem to be more and more popular these days, although i’m not sure it needed to be. The graphics do work quite well on the eye in that form, but replacing the sprites with vectors I don’t think would have changed much. 8-bit style I think starts to suffer the higher resolution you go, sort of making a mockery of the whole thing, and looking at screenshots, it might be easier on my eyes if I played it windowed, or on a handheld. In glorious bright neon red/orange mixes on my larger monitor, it’s a spit away from giving me a migraine. This is before you have to start dealing with the barrage of stuff that’s going on.

Thrust was mostly sedate, until moments when you just tumbled out of control, panicked, and flew straight into a mountain. With Hyperspace Dogfights I have a hard enough time wondering how far I am from the ground, interspersed with moments where I actually fly *into* the ground, pull up, and back out of it. WTF?

In theory, there are missions, which are generated randomly as far as I can tell, which make up the “levels”. Between each one you “jump”, which can be a bit hit and miss on the detection of the key presses (just hammer the W key, preferably *with* a hammer) and there’s the option to buy stuff. What it was I was buying I’ve never figured out. Maybe repairs, maybe something else.

There were pickups while I was flying around which might have been cash recovered from the enemies I’d just trashed. I may never know.

There is the interesting option of ground enemies, which sometimes you have to take out, which requires a balancing act of reversing thrust while pointed vaguely in their direction. This would have been easier if I wasn’t under fire from the airborne forces at the same time. Another mission I played included an airborne fortress which I was able to disable reasonably competently.

I want to like this game, I really do. The combination of permadeath, the amount of clutter and objects to track just defeats me. I believe that towards the end of the hour I was starting to improve, but the cost/reward ratio just doesn’t feel enough to encourage me to put the effort in to get much better. Trying the mouse aim might help, versus the WASD rotate and thrust option, but I’m not madly hopeful.

I guess this is just one of those games I’m just really shit at.

The soundtrack is really nice, and hopefully might reveal itself more if I manage to progress a little further, and is available as a DLC with the main game.

Given I’m shit at it, I shouldn’t blame the game too much, but it could do with better HUD and message management, so I can give it a firm 7/10.