Every once and a while, a game developer might respond to reviews left for a game for one reason or another. One negative review for Hypercharge: Unboxed drew the developers’ attention, and they responded in a wholesome way.
For those who don’t know, Hypercharge: Unboxed, developed by Digital Cybercherries, is a first-person shooter featuring different toys as playable characters and enemies. The game mixes tower-defense with wave-based shooting, and players get to enjoy different PvE and PvP modes. Players are tasked with defending a HYPER-CORE, which is something that apparently keeps the toys alive. The game brings to mind other toy games like Toy Soldiers or Army Men. For the developers, the game is a love letter to the toys of the 80s and 90s.
The most recent update, Major Update #3, for Hypercharge: Unboxed mainly added a third-person perspective and smart bots. The bots can join a player for both PvE and PvP modes. Unfortunately, one player wasn’t so happy about the addition of bots. They took to Steam reviews to voice their frustration with the game, writing “Fun game but no one is ever playing it so forced to play with bots,” and gave the game a thumbs down.
Well, it turns out that the developers of the game saw the review. Joe Henson, part of the dev team and a press contact, decided to respond. Henson first thanked the player for saying the game was fun, and went on to offer an explanation as to why they introduced bots. “We are doing everything we can to promote the game to a wider audience. We’re a five-man indie team and do not have a huge marketing budget. There’s only so much we can reasonably do.” It seems like Digital Cybercherries wanted to improve the player experience by helping players have full teams when there aren’t many people online.
Henson went on to invite the reviewer to their Discord in order to find some other players to play with. He even added the reviewer as a friend on Steam and welcomed them to play together sometime. The interaction ended up being shared on the main gaming thread on Reddit, where it then gained a lot of traction.
Game developers respond to player concerns all the time, but typically don’t take the time to respond to reviews. Fortunately for Digital Cybercherries, this response seems to have worked out in their favor. After seeing the wholesome interaction on Reddit, many players were prompted to buy the game for themselves. Several of these new players have even left positive reviews for the game. Hopefully, the original reviewer even got to make good on Joe Henson’s offer to play together.
It looks like the developers are looking to work on the game for a time to come. They have a released a road-map through Q2 of 2021, plan to add DLC, and have even commented on cross-platform play. While there isn’t currently cross-platform support for Hypercharge, it is something the team may add in the future. An addition like that would definitely help expand the available player base, since the PC and Switch player pools would be combined.
While the dev team’s response may not instill confidence in everyone who has problems with the game, it at least shows the team is willing to listen to player concerns. Hopefully for Digital Cybercherries, and Hypercharge players, the game will continue to grow in popularity.
Hypercharge: Unboxed is available on PC and Nintendo Switch.
Source: Reddit, Hypercharge Site
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