Hexopods is a top-down arena shooter made by a single Game design student, Spyboy. As a one-man game, from someone without years of experience, and as a fellow game design student I was interested to see how the game is.

Gameplay

Hexopods is a top-down arena shooter that you can play with up to 4 players in couch-coop. This also was my first complaint, why is there no online multiplayer it suits the game perfectly and I think this would drastically improve the sales of the game, apart from that the game actually is pretty cool, and online multiplayer might still be added later.

You can play as 1 of 4 ships, all ships have their regular attack which is a fully automatic laser gun that shoots 2 projectiles that will gradually move apart from each other.  You can also at any given point, slow those bullets and can change their direction once with 90 degrees to the left or right. Besides these already kind of complicated basic attacks, all 4 ships have 4 unique skills to add some more complexity to the game.

A couple of examples of these are a laser that passes through walls blades that spin around your ship, a dash and teleporters that also teleport projectiles. So when you add all these things up you get a pretty complex game with a high skill cap. I think this makes for a really fun and interesting experience, but I think it’s kind of a waste because it is couch-coop only. It’s already hard to find people to come over to your house and play a game together, let alone the fact that you need some practice to really master the game mechanics, so I hope one day we will see online multiplayer for this game as it would drastically improve it.

Graphics

Hexopods is made in Construct 2 which isn’t the most powerful engine ever but the game runs fine and has a cool art style that reminded me of geometry wars. the bright colors are not only nice to look at but also very useful to tell your projectiles apart from your opponent’s. I think this art style also really fits the game and its fast-paced gameplay. There are a few different maps but they only have walls in a different position but overall I’m quite satisfied with how the game looks.

Replayability

As I had already mentioned before, a lot of the replayability is taken away by the lack of multiplayer, I would love to play this game more often but I’m not able to have friends over every day. but if you do, you could really get hooked on the fast and exciting matches of Hexopods with its high skill cap and tense moments. that’s why I think this game still has some good potential. The only problem is, being able to actually play the game can be a hard thing. and that should never be the case in a game especially not with such a high skill cap.