Season One of the Playdate lineup had a lot of great stuff in it, all of which was exclusive to the little yellow handheld. The library was packed with games from a surprisingly large number of well-known indie creators and studios, including Keita Takahashi, Bennet Foddy, Serenity Forge, and Vertex Pop. That last one was known previously for the excellent We Are Doomed, Graceful Explosion Machine, and Super Crush KO, with that third game being all the way back in 2020. It’s nice to think that “all quiet” means “busy” but there’s always the little nagging doubt that might be nothing more than wishful thinking, so seeing Hyper Meteor on Playdate was a good sign. Now a year after release Hyper Meteor is getting ported from Playdate to Steam and Switch, complete with a full-color upgrade from its original home on a black and white screen.
Hyper Meteor is a fairly simple game about bashing into asteroids and enemies, breaking and destroying everything on screen without the benefit of a fire button. In the original Endless mode everything is two-toned light and dark, with the light side able to be plowed into without any worry, while the dark side is shielded resulting in a one-hit death for the player on contact. Asteroids break apart into smaller units until eventually the small all-light version can be destroyed with a single hit, while the bigger ones rotate at varying speeds to make life difficult in targeting the safe spot. A little timing in the early sections of the game makes the starting areas relatively easy to clear out, but once the screen gets crowded with multiple asteroids and different types of enemies it requires a careful touch on the thrusters to avoid plowing into something you blatantly obviously did not want to touch. Death may be inconvenient but losing the chain bonus can be outright painful.
Hyper Meteor is a straight-up arcade game, something you could have easily pumped a few quarters into back in the earliest days of gaming if you conveniently ignore how few moving objects those games could actually display on screen. New to this version are three more game modes beyond the original Endless plus local multiplayer for two-player ramming action, not to mention various color palettes and other goodies. Hyper Meteor releases on Steam and Switch on July 27, so give the trailer a view to see its arcade action get far more complicated than its simple premise would suggest.
