Hypercharge: Unboxed, the toy-soldier shooter, has finally made its way to PS5 after releasing on PC back in 2020 and Xbox last year. Now, though, we have the full package with Hypercharge: Unboxed, an aesthetically pleasing shooter that does very little to keep you interested.

Hypercharge puts you in the tiny plastic shoes of an action figure, where you will jump and blast your way around various regular environments blown up to enormous proportions. It’s quite a striking aesthetic as you wage war across a garden, kitchen counter, or toy store aisle. It all looks fantastic, and Digital Cybercherries has nailed that sense of scale.

There’s a whole Saturday morning cartoon vibe with the game’s campaign, which bears little consequence to what you’re actually doing from moment to moment. Missions — of which there are 14 — boil down to a basic tower defence mode, where either in solo or with up to four players, you must defend hypercores against waves of various toy-based enemy types.

Enemies include the green plastic soldiers and even a Beyblade-like spinner. For anyone who spent their childhood creating fictional battlefields with their favourite toys, fighting these enemies can feel somewhat cathartic and wholesome. There’s also a PvP offering, which sees two teams of four action figures face off in inventive arenas, and it can be good fun for a quick casual game or two — it even has some decent DualSense haptics.

But that really marks the biggest issue with Hypercharge. It has a real lack of gameplay or mechanical depth, so while it is fun to experience the novelty of its settings, weapons, and enemies, once all that wears off, there isn’t much left to keep you around. The gameplay feels overly simplistic, the AI is incredibly dumb, and it’s missing that energy found in most great shooters. We were won over by the charm of Hypercharge, but not by anything else.