Hello! Welcome to a new regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few weeks. This time: A Ubisoft Battle Royale, a truly immersive sim, and fun with cards.
Designers: be careful with your fonts. My wife thinks Hyper Scape is called Hyper Slap. Such is the confusing retro-futurism of the title screen. She’ll come into the living room: “Oh, you’re playing Hyper Slap again.”
I am playing Hyper Scape again. I am terrible at it, and as the audience dwindles it takes longer and longer to get a match going, which is an awful fate for a Battle Royale, which needs so many players. But when the matches do kick off, I feel like this might be an underappreciated charmer. Combat is brisk and movement is wonderfully smooth, but it’s the map that has me: a sort of grey-box take on a European city, right down to a huge model of Notre Dame.
Actually, it’s the upgrades. Alongside weapons and health packs, you search the streets of Hyper Scape for the game’s equivalents of magical abilities – invisibility, say, or the ability to throw up a wall between you and your attacker. The very best, though, turns you into a beach ball and lets you bounce through the emptying streets for minutes at a time. Thonk, thonk, thonk. What a strange, stylish treat this game is – don’t miss out.
It’s race week! Well, it’s race month, really – the season kicks off proper with the 24 Hours of Daytona at the tail-end of January, and before that we get its virtual counterpart run in iRacing. Prepping for one of these things is business, and my team’s been running test sessions and fine-tuning our set-up since the festive break, and with only a handful of days to go until lights out things have started to get really serious. We’re currently in the process of getting the livery down for Scuderia Chickenhouse’s Dallara LMP2, and it’s perhaps the most important task of the lot.