Video games can test the skills of players in so many ways. The twitch reflexes of an action or fighting game, the reasoning of a puzzle, the patience of grinding, but nothing makes you feel more challenged than to build a world from the ground up and keep it alive, in essence making you a god. That’s the feeling that ActaLogic is trying to convey in their new alien themed strategy, Hypernova. You play as survivors of a soon to be destroyed world trying to seed a new world that will be ready for your new race, and as motivations go, it’s a solid start, though the opening movie tends to make light of the much direr situation.

Hypernova is an odd mix of both Real Time Strategy, and Tower Defense. The RTS element consists of bad guys and natural enemies coming to break your newly made camp, and you having a gods’ eye view to create a civilization from scratch and defend from everything in sight. The main focus is to build your population to a certain level, so as to save the alien race as a whole. But getting to that point is no easy feat, as its domino effect to accomplish even the simplest task. Want to build a hut? You better have the materials, and to get that, you need a miner, and to have a miner, you need energy, and to have energy, you need a probe, and the list goes on and on.

While this is almost always the case in any RTS game, they usually stick with one kind of material to get, making it simple to know what you need. But in Hypernova, there are at least 4 kinds of different rock right from the start that you need to mine, and there are so many buildings, that it takes a tree diagram to even display it all. If it was just one material, or one money system, it would have made things so much easier to understand, but now you are bombarded with way too much info far too fast to even grasp what you need to do to survive.

Also, while having the tutorial on should give you messages, because of the over-complexity of the gameplay, you are assaulted with so many info screens that popup and ruin the game flow.

While the RTS flow takes what seems like forever to get going, you do start to make headway into building cool things, but because there are just so many sub-tasks that each require a new building or machine I found it took more than an hour of solid play time so start being fun, which is a bad sign. The TD aspect of the gameplay is part of the reason for the increase in fun, as it forces you to place your buildings and weapons very particularly so as to maximize range. Anticipating routes, the enemies strength, and their plan of attack is where this shines, as it definitely reminds me of some of the better TD games out there, though the zoom in feature is not as fun, as you can’t watch your little defenders do their job all the time.

While the setting is cool, the motivations are real, the look and feel are both colorful and weird (which fits perfectly), the gameplay just drags it down so much. Strategy games are not meant to be kiddie games, or extremely easy, but this level of convolution is just taxing. When I have a new threat, instead meeting the challenge with my emplacements, I’m usually scrolling through the vast building skill tree to find what I need, and I’m missing all the fun. If you love RTS type games, and don’t mind some complexity along the way though, then this is for you.