Hyper Parasite’s 80’s themed opening sets the tone for this trippy twin-stick shooter where you play a parasite intent on death and destruction.

Yeah, this is a real spin on convention, putting you in the guise of a life-sucking, body-inhabiting organism that just wants to watch the world burn.

It’s certainly an interesting time to release a game like this with everything happening in the world, but pretty soon you’ll see less life-threatening organisms, more maniacs driving shopping trollies into other humans in an oddly retro cyberpunk world. Thankfully, you’ll find, there’s not that many correlations with our stark reality.

Plus Hyper Parasite is actually a pretty decent rogue-like that offers a real variance in environments, characters and boss battles, even if it does have a unique sense of humour.

You can level up your oozing glob, giving it more health points, range, and firepower, but the parasite is always at its weakest when it’s not hosting a human body. Which is why you need to make quick and effective use of the dodge button, otherwise it’ll be a short day out of sludgey.

Once the parasite is killed, it’s game over, and the person who got the killing blow becomes hero of the day. Because, frankly, they probably bloody deserve it.

When in range, though, the little life sucker can jump into a human body and run around as that character until you decide to destroy them from the inside out. It’s pretty gross.

Not all humans can be inhabited though, and some have to be weakened before they can, so keep an eye for a little padlock above their heads and save yourself that embarrassment.

Each human in the game has different abilities, like the aforementioned Supermarket Sweep wannabe, but there’s also an armed police officer, and even a Geisha who uses their fans to fire projectiles.

The aim is to gather as much cash as you can, destroy scenery, slaughter other humans and survive for as long as possible. The moment you die, like with all rogue-likes, you go back to the start and begin another run.

Now, you probably get why everything has to be destroyed, but what the hell does a pile of goop want with money? Well, in Hyper Parasite you can use it to unlock characters in one of the game’s hub areas as long as you’ve found their brain. Lovely.

When unlocked, the characters can be found in the game and manipulated to do your bidding.  And this can be extremely useful, especially when you come to the game’s boss battles.

Some of these are really tough, as you’re often competing against sub-enemies, laser beams, launch attacks, and recharging health.

Hyper Parasite has more to it than first appears – the quick and easy movement system via the map is mega convenient, and there’s some really nice sequences and the range of characters keeps things interesting.

It’s not the best in class roguelike you’ll find out there, but this hybrid shooter has some unique hooks and takes that offer decent replayability and entertainment throughout.

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Hyper Parasite is now available on PC, PS4, XO and Switch

Reviewed on PS4

Code Provided by Hound Picked Games