HYPERNOVA: Escape from Hadea

HYPERNOVA: Escape from Hadea starts with a nice and funny intro.
It combines a mixture between base building, resource management, tower defense and real-time strategy.
You play as an alien race, you are escaping your moon, because the sun is dying. You have to colonize another planet to get natural resources so your race will survive. Only this planet is inhabited by angry creatures. Also, this planet is covered with a thick layer of fog, you need to purify the air.
At the start of the game, you have to select where you will build your base. It would be wise to build it close to the three different resource types (Omnifoam, Multicrete, and Zapp) that can be found on this planet. You need all three to build things. The map is huge.
New buildings can be unlocked by researching them in the tech-tree. The tech-tree is big, so there is a lot to do/build.
On the map there are some lairs, evil creatures spawn from there and they will attack all your bases. To avoid this you need to built offenses/towers to attack the creatures and their dwellings and at the same protect your buildings.
Before you can build anything you need to purify the fog.
You can play this game fully with a mouse, of course you still can use a keyboard (camera controls)
The game has a good built in tutorial, I did really like that.
There are three difficulty options from which you can choose.
The graphics are very good and colorful, it's a pleasant to look at. The music is good and the game has spoken text, even in the tutorial.
There is no speed option, hope it will be added.
I also wish the game could be zoomed out further, so you can have a better view.
I found a bug when trying to name a save, because I could not do it. All my save files have the same name, it's a bit confusing.
This game has a lot of options, so you won't get bored if you like this genre(s)
Price tag is absolutely fair (the devs lowered the base price, which is good)
I would give this game a 7.5 out of 10
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Fun and addictive. Just one more 3D print please, and I'm off to bed. :-)
This is a tower defense game that pleasing aesthetics make it worth your time. If you like tower defense games, this one is one of the prettiest I have seen so far. Music is also decent. Try it and refund it if you don't like it. But you will.
Recommended.

**Disclaimer** - I won this game in a competition set by another games storefront and the developers themselves. This in no way has influenced this review and the views are mine and mine alone. Trust me, I'm a heavily critical person!
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Forget what you know about ActaLogic games of the past. The developer is now free from crummy German simulatior publishers that have provided only limited funding, pre-launch development time, creativity and post launch support. This is ActaLogic going indie, and as a result, HyperNova: Escape from Hadea is an original Strategy sub genre bending game that shows what a developer can do when they're free of Publisher / Investor influences!
Hypernova is part Planetary Colony Sim, part RTS, part Tower defence/offense. I would go as far as to say that the game also has strongly inspired 4X elements in it too (I'll justify my reasoning below). A combination that works surprisingly well.
So what do you do? Well you arrive just above the Hayan Moon's surface with a single Mothership, which is a giant 3D printing Mobile Construction yard. From there, you can explore the large map in your own time and choose absolutely anywhere in which to land and settle your colony with varying degrees of difficulty. From there you must eXpand your colony and eXploit the resources available to you. You must continue to then explore, expand and exploit the map further in order to increase your colony's population to a high set limit, research technologies from a reasonable sized tech tree and discover 4 extremely rare resources that will allow you to build the final Stellar Bridge technology so you can escape the threat of the sun going Hypernova.
So what about the eXterminate element? Well the landscape is littered with local wildlife that are none too happy to see you arrive. In-fact the more you expand and take a foothold, the more they'll get ever increasingly hacked off! So in true Tower defence style, you research and build a number of towers to protect your colony from harm. You cannot sit back and take it though. The wildlife spawn from Hives in ever increasing waves. The level of threat to a hive you pose determines how often those waves come, and not all Hives are equal. Some are docile, others are (especially in the later game) willing to give Starcraft's persistent Zerg Rushes a run for their money!
Luckily towers are effectively your units, and like many of the other structures in the game, can be moved anywhere where you have cleared the harmful atmosphere and are able to supply power. This means you will take the fight to their hives, and quite literally set off the hornet's nest as the wildlife makes their last stand to survive.
The game will start off particularly easy, and you'll find yourself becoming a little complacent. But as time goes on, the difficulty will ramp gradually until you are attacking and defending on multiple fronts, strategically trying to manage the resources available so they don't expire too fast (they do regenerate), whilst trying to manage your colony effectively to reach the next population milestone, so you can research more technologies to gain the edge.
Pros
- An original and innovative strategy sub-genre blend that's incredibly fun to play & draws you in!
- Plenty of depth, management, and strategy!
- A great game for those who enjoy slow-burn strategy games from RTS/TD/4X & Management sims.
- Fantastic colourful world, lore and characters.
- Even after many hours of game time, no crashes or noticable bugs!
- Plenty of potential replayability with 3 difficulty levels, and different challenges and outcomes based on where you land!
Cons
- The music, whilst not annoying, can get a little repetitive.
- The game is slow-burn (Not really a con in my eyes). So not advised for anyone wishing to start and finish within 30-60 minutes
- The game can become rather micro intensive and fiddly in later stages when multiple battles are taking place across many fronts.
- Single Player Only
- Only 1 Map, 1 Campaign Game Mode. No Skirmish.
All in all, this is ActaLogic's greatest game to date! Not just by a country mile, but a Marathon and then some. As a result, we have one of the most innovative, original and fun Strategy games to be released in quite a long time!
I highly recommend it!

I was convinced to buy Hypernova because it was described as a cross between Tower Defence (TD) and Real Time Strategy (RTS). As someone who prefers TD to RTS, my initial reaction was that it plays more like Starcraft than Defense Grid. Having said that, I still found it quite playable and a good mash-up of the two genres. After playing it for several hours, I now believe it is a kind of free-form TD game.
I thought the graphics and sound were quite nice, if a bit colourful and cartoon-like. They seem in keeping with the alien race you represent, who are reminiscent of Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars, only green and speaking with a Jamaican accent. You might or might not like the graphics. I guess it's a matter of how seriously you take your sci-fi. Some people don't like it when sci-fi is made to look a bit silly. Personally, I think the artists in Hypernova did a good job and the overall presentation is very good.
The map is very big, so a game is likely to last several hours. You have to place all your towers within the radius of other towers, so there's a lot of micro-management, but you're never sure whether you have too many or too few towers. Various environmental forces can cause damage to your facilities, such as meteors and tornadoes. You can also get attacked from any side, so there's a tendency to smother the perimeter of the area you have under your control with turrets, just in case.
To begin with, the game seems easy and gives you plenty of time. The waves of Hadeans (the native creatures of the moon Hadea) gradually get harder, with greater numbers and new species. The problems start when they rush you and your terra-forming network starts to collapse in on itself. Your thinly spread defensive towers immediately go off-line, leading to a cascade of destruction. Fortunately, the Hadeans come in waves with a gap in-between, so you have a window of time to rebuild after the destruction and prepare for the next wave.
You learn to make sure that your defences are sufficient to repel most attacks and then have little forays towards enemy bases to take them out with long range weapons. The aliens react with extreme hostility to these attacks. Sometimes you will lose a few towers, or you may withdraw them. The process becomes a little bit tedious. Everything gets so spread out and towers take so long to arrive, that setting up a crushing attack is not easy. Also, you run out of resources to build and it's not abundantly clear what factor is causing your build queue to stall. To cope with this, you must decide which areas are safe and can have their defences moved to the emerging battlefront, elsewhere on the map.
You must build resilient networks that can be re-routed or only fail in parts. In this way you can spread out across the map with the aim of destroying the nests of creatures which attack your colony. Ultimately the aim of the game is to build a stellar-bridge that will transport your species away from the danger of the local star which is about to explode.

tl;dr: An interesting addition to the tower defense genre with a bunch of serious shortcomings.
A tower defense game that has just one giant map and your goal is to "conquer" all of it while fulfilling a number of tasks that will make your life harder?
Haven't heard that one yet.
But surprisingly, it works. Mostly.
You expand via your buildings and towers (all of which you can move around as they can lift off and fly), mine resources to build them and research new towers and improvements (for example, more electricity to be able to have MORE TOWERS!!).
Meanwhile, you will be attacked from various lairs in the map and have to place your towers so that you can defend your vital buildings: mines, purifiers which make areas buildable and relays that transport electricity to your towers.
In the beginning, only one lair will pester you, but as you grow, more will join the fray as well as other things happening to make your life worse (won't spoil them).
The tasks I wrote about above are to increase your population, gather special resources, use those to build an escape portal (hence the title) and an additional one that is unlocked later on.
The art is very consistent, competently done and just cute.
As is the music and sound. The voices are also well done, but I imagine the "false rastafari style" speech might annoy a few people.
It would be a great little game, really, if it were not for the downsides:
The biggest problem, as others have pointed out, too, is the grind and pacing.
Instead of steadily increasing what you have to do, the gameplay almost automatically comes to a halt every now and then as you are waiting for research to happen, resources to be gathered or buildings to be built.
It isn't really a fluent experience. Instead you have those phases with nothing happening at all interrupting the rest.
Especially in the first 3-4 hours it is hard to keep yourself motivated.
If you do manage to keep playing, things improve a lot as more and more lairs will be bothering you, as well as other things going on requiring your attention.
But I can understand those that have stopped before that point very well.
Another problem is the balancing of the creatures. The first 5-6 creature types are total pushovers.
But suddenly, one creature type is unlocked that will just waltz right through your towers, destroying them by the dozens before it is dealt with - and there is no way to focus fire as far as I can tell. This can very much ruin your game after 3 hours or so of playing.
Especially since the game might just decide to autosave right in that moment (and there is only one autosave slot instead of rotating ones).
Manual saving is very much recommended.
The controls might also get in your way. While you can use control groups, you can only effectively group defense towers together. If you are like me and used to also grouping same-style producer buildings together to produce quicker, you are out of luck.
Now, you CAN theoretically group together producer buildings, but it is pointless as that doesn't let you build anything while having multiple ones selected.
What really happens is that you'll have to assign each armory (which builds defensive towers) an extra group, same with the mothership and the other building producing non-defense buildings.
To make matters worse, the game has a selection limit for some unfathomable reason. You can have only 20 towers in one group, and trust me, that is not enough by far for anything but the early game. Especially considering that you will lose and have to replace lots of towers, which then means more fiddling around with control groups and the selection limit.
Very annoying and this should have been done much better.
All in all, this is a recommendable game, but you should not expect it to be flawless or entertain you endlessly.

Love it! It looks gorgeous! And Jamaica references are funny. Those poor guys are just trying to live in peace. Help them guys!

A surprising hidden gem. A tower defense but more emphasis on the management and city building side. It has its flaws like the narrator being too chatty and difficult to know where the creeps would enter your island, but despite that it still had me hooked and compelled to complete the game.