Hyper Meteor (Playdate)

Hyper Meteor looks a great deal like the 1979 arcade classic Asteroids, but a few small changes to the formula help it to be a great deal more exhilarating. While you’re still flying a pointy ship through a stretch of space filled with asteroids, in Hyper Meteor your weapons no longer work, meaning all you have for breaking apart space rocks is your vessel itself. Ramming right into rocks to obliterate them definitely adds an extra layer of danger as you need to actually charge towards the space debris you’re trying to clear, but that’s only the first small alteration that ends up changing the way you’ll chase high scores in this Playdate action game.

 

While any part of your spaceship is able to break an object on contact, you can’t just go ramming blindly into whatever appears. Objects tend to comprise of black and white parts, and should you make contact with a black region, you will be the one that gets destroyed instead. As a result, you need to watch for how the meteors spin and activate your thrusters to smash into the white parts if you want to clear the asteroids away, although an asteroid will break apart into smaller pieces you then have to deal with. Smaller rocks rotate more quickly, although the smallest chunks of the meteors are completely white and actually play into the game’s scoring system quite well since placing highly on Hyper Meteor’s leaderboards is going to come down to your mastery of the multiplier.

To increase the score value of the objects you destroy, you’ll need to keep a combo chain going. Too much time between destroying an object will cause the combo meter to completely deplete, meaning you’re back to the basic values. At the same time, keeping up the combos for a while will let you build up to higher and higher multipliers, and with high scores the main goal in this little Season 1 Playdate game, you’ll want to be aggressive enough to keep the combo chain alive but also smart about what you destroy. If you clear the field too quickly, you might be left without a way to keep your multiplier, but if you take it too slow instead, you of course face the issue that a bunch of dangerous objects are floating all around the game’s rather limited single screen play field.

 

Your own controls are pretty easy to come to grips with. The Playdate crank here is used for angling the front of the ship, the player then using either a button or a direction on the D-pad to activate thrusters to fly forward. Considering the fact most player’s right hand will be working hard on the crank to keep adjusting the flight angle, having the D-Pad also serve as a button substitute does wonders for keeping the game comfortable to handle. The bomb option is similarly set to both a button and a direction, a bomb able to freeze the action briefly and wipe out everything on screen. As you play you’ll get extra lives and bombs, but bombs are handed out less often, making them the more valuable commodity in some ways but also a very useful tool for keeping the combo alive. If you can’t attack something safely in time or want to avoid a death that also comes with a combo reset, a bomb drop is a good way to stay in the game a bit longer. It’s that tiny bit of extra strategy weighing that works well in a compact game like this, it not all about just ramming yourself through objects repeatedly for points.

What really helps Hyper Meteor rise above its inspiration though is the new dangers that arise the longer a run lasts. At first it is just a matter of dealing with the meteors, but as you play, you’ll progress though different levels. The play never stops when you go up a level, and really the levels could perhaps be thought of more as danger levels as over time they’ll introduce new threats. While asteroids drift around the play field, sometimes going off screen and reappearing on the other edge, the new dangers are more active enemies that can actually target you. Triangular ships that lazily chase after you, spinning stars with one black point, and a large circle that opens fire should you not slip between its black orb barriers to eliminate it in time start appearing, later levels introducing additional enemies and upping the frequency with which foes appear. The new more active dangers necessitate a lot more careful play and you need to account for their movement differently to survive, these often being what truly puts a run at risk if not managed well. The mix of survival and score chasing works very well once the enemies join the action, the decisions on what to target first or when to bomb also joined by judgment calls like whether letting a combo die is preferable to a risky move or if the playfield will get too busy if you try to leave things alive just to make comboing easier. The meteors even get more dangerous as a result as well, the fact they occupy large chunks of space much more meaningful when enemies might be right up against them.

 

A scrolling geometric background keeps it easy to spot the black and white objects well even on the small Playdate screen and the pumping music suits the the player-guided action well, especially since Hyper Meteor is the kind of game where you can start to master its movement for very pleasing maneuvers. Drifting your spacecraft through asteroids or doing a quick pivot to get around an enemy’s black part for a stylish kill helps to show how well the crank can work as a control method here. Hyper Meteor did end up getting a rerelease on Switch and Steam with more colors than monotone and a few additional modes, although it does feel like something could be lost by getting away from that precise crank control. The added physical touch and the ability to point in the exact direction you desire with ease makes the pursuit of a high score something you can get addicted to, the player learning the particulars of how to navigate the ship to the point you can start doing the kinds of charges through enemies and meteors that might have seemed far too risky when you first started.

THE VERDICT: Hyper Meteor may be a small twist on Asteroids, but it has the right ideas on how to make its high score chase the kind you keep trying to do better at. The crank control gives you the precision necessary to handle the increasingly clustered play field, the enemies having safe and deadly regions asks you to constantly be watching their movement, and the combo meter keeps you consistently engaged as a special variable that encourages bold but intelligent play. While more relaxed sessions could survive quite a while, the multiplier will be what helps you hit the leaderboards, leading to a constant engagement as you’re weighing how valuable a kill is in terms of keeping you safe and keeping the combo alive.

 

And so, I give Hyper Meteor for Playdate…

A GOOD rating. One of my first reactions to Hyper Meteor is that it felt like this simple action game should have potentially been the first game offered to a player in Playdate’s first season of gratis games. Whitewater Wipeout is a more difficult to master game and its rougher parts make it more polarizing, but it also is a more unique first game to see that shows off Playdate’s visuals better than Hyper Meteor. Hyper Meteor on the other hand is the more cleanly designed experience, and while it doesn’t look unique, it feels like it is better built to keep you whipping out your Playdate to try and beat your last score. The combo system is vital when it comes to achieving enough points for a run to matter, and because you can’t just sit around setting up all your destruction if you want to get a high score, you’re constantly feeling the pressure of every object in the field and trying to be smart about how you approach them. Hyper Meteor doesn’t feel like a game that really has any clear faults as a result, a player perhaps likely to wish for additional modes like in the releases on other systems or maybe some more enemy types, but even the climb to get back to where you died last time can be made more productive thanks to how the multiplier builds up so resetting isn’t too disheartening either.

 

Hyper Meteor is more addictive and layered than Asteroids without really having to deviate it from it in huge ways. A few extra variables opens up a wide range of considerations without overcomplicating your task, and the simple shift to ramming things to break them apart makes every bit of destruction a bit more visceral and dangerous than simply firing a laser from afar. With the crank part of the movement, it’s no wonder the control’s subtleties lead to such satisfying flight through foes. Every bit of destruction can be set up with skillful precision, but the need to act fast keeps it exciting to boot. Hyper Meteor is definitely a good add to Playdate’s first round of games, it not really wowing anyone with its ideas but the well considered mechanics are what make it the kind of enjoyable game that didn’t need impressive frills to keep you coming back for more.