Hyper Flex

Tough platformers have a pretty large niche of the indie games market, especially since the developers do not have to worry about massive amounts of money in the process. Hence, they can let their creativity rip and try to punish the players as much as possible, which is how most great platformers come to life. Still, a bit of imagination is needed to attract a decent crowd.

Hyper Flex is pretty difficult to call one thing or the other, although it’s quite clearly a platformer of sorts. In essence, the whole point is to run and jump over things, except only the jumping is left up to you. There are no characters and no great story to provide you with purpose, so the only attraction is staying alive for as long as possible and avoiding as many traps as you can.

Speaking of which, these traps can be quite deadly if you do not manage to avoid them. Whether you hit a wall or run into a spike, anything is a guaranteed instadeath, because there’s no way to survive an encounter with a trap. While this makes things a lot more difficult, it also makes them a lot more frustrating, and the rewards are not always worth it.

The levels are just successions of various trap patterns, and you get to recognize them after a few minutes of gameplay. Jumping is the only thing that needs to be on your mind, because nothing else works anyway. As such, you need to jump at the right time and synchronize your movement according to the environment, which is a lot tougher than it sounds.

Unfortunately, the obstacle patterns become repetitive after a little while, and the whole experience gets a bit too boring. While it can be pretty exciting to pursue the final high score, given the fact that you are promised a surprise at the end, it doesn’t seem like a very attractive prospect. The graphics are pretty poor as well.

All things considered, Hyper Flex can certainly be fun if you enjoy platformers, but not for a very long time. It gets repetitive too quickly, because it’s tough to stay excited about the same couple of obstacles repeated over and over again.