Opinions on games can differ a lot between people, even those who get on quite well. Both the station manager Digm and I had the same game to review recently. While Digm didn’t really enjoy it much, I got on much better with it.

Hive Jump is an indie sci-fi shooter title developed and published by studio Graphite Lab. It’s on both PC/Mac/Linux and also the Wii U, and I was reviewing the PC version of the game. The game sets you in the role of an army of space soldiers, blasting your way through a hive of alien insects of all different shapes, sizes and abilities. How many soldiers? As many as you want, infinite respawned soldiers with randomly generated names… that is as long as you keep your backpack intact. Once it’s gone – no more respawn and the next death is game over.

The hive levels are randomly generated upon each play, and enemies will keep coming as long as their spawning nests are still undestroyed. Getting rid of them is advised to stop yourself getting overrun. Like any good game of this ilk, you get to upgrade your weaponry and even unlock new ones the more you play. To pay for these upgrades, you collect alien ‘goo’ that comes from killing the insectoid enemies, bursting spawner nests and also the weird alien pustules scattered around the walls and floor. You can also sometimes find ‘resupply’ crates that will contain either more explosives, a ton of ‘goo’ or on less common occasions goo and an upgrade.

The game comes with challenge, campaign and arcade modes, and each run will end with some sort of boss fight or varying difficulties depending on how good you are with your jump timing and the boost jet you have. There’s no fall damage which is nice, frankly in such a hostile environment everything else is trying to hurt you so it’s good to not have that additional damage to just make things more difficult. The game can also be played with 1-4 players in both local and online co-op, although I’ve not managed to try out multiplayer co-op yet. I hope to soon though. The game also has some customisation options, with both your soldier’s appearance and weapon set-up being available for tweaking before a playthrough and your weapon set-up being able to be tweaked in between each level of the hive.

I really enjoyed this game, it was fast-paced, exciting, challenging and there was enough going on with it that I didn’t feel it was too repetitive. The only complaint I might have is that after I unlocked the weapon set-up I wanted, I didn’t feel the need to purchase any more unlocks, but if I play more I might experiment more with different weaponry and set-ups. My soldier will always be purple though.

If you want to see my video review of it, click here: