Hypersensitive Bob Review

Seriously, if I had to play another “Binding of Isaac” type of game I would probably kill myself. And it’s not because they are bad or anything, it’s because I suck at them and that does collateral damage to my anger management, which is pretty bad to begin with, hence why I like steering clear from such titles. Recently I reviewed a similar game: Metal Tales and yeah it did make me angry but there I had the music to lean on. Here I don’t have that. I just have pain and misery and I understand now why Bob is hyperf*ckngsensitive. My list of complains can go on and on, but let’s not chuck everything in the first paragraph and get on with it step by step.

Okay, let’s begin with gameplay. Like I said, this is your typical “Binding of Isaac” game with a different setting and characters. So you play with Bob and honestly I don’t fricking know what the eff he is. Some type of creature thingy and you have unlockable characters too – Bill and Spoopy. In the game there is this vaccine machine … okay, let’s get down to motives first actually.

Apparently Bob is getting some sort of treatment and what we experience is the side effects of it. I don’t really know if that is true or not but it’s at least what I thought because quite frankly I saw the game over screen so many times I lost count. And in reality when we die, doctor says something along the lines of “Stahp!!! This is too much for him to handle!!!!” but in a less retarded way than me. So boom game over – back to the beginning. So I’m guessing the room we start in is some sort of hospital room – am I reading too much into this? Guys? No? Ok.

What surprised me, because I don’t see this very often is the fact that the game has no main menu. Sure it does have the “press Esc button menu” but that’s about it. In a way, the beginning room, as I like to call it, is the main menu and I think this is a nice touch.

Anyway, as I was saying, since the game has a heavily implied medical setting, remember the characters I mentioned that you can unlock? So I started telling you about the vaccine machine. In every level there is a small chance to spawn this machine and it has levels, starting from 0, all the way up to 10. You basically unlock Bill at level 5 and Spoopy at level 10. At every level up, the machine gives you something extra, but there is also a chance, when you give it vaccines, for it to break, which is a bummer. Now because I said that this is a “Binding of Isaac” type of game, obviously everything you acquire is for the current playthrough only, but the only thing that carries over is the vaccine machine level. Huzzah! One good thing in this world of misery. Just in case you wanted to know – Bob is the same creature type as Bill and Spoopy is some kind of ghost thingy.

I like the items variety in Hypersensitive Bob. There are a lot of items and interesting at that. Of course you have those that help out, those that screw you up (I found that the hard way, when I accidentally picked up a bad item and it screwed my playthrough – what it did was to reverse my shooting directions, so basically I had to press left to shoot right, up to shoot down, etc.), but there are also items which benefit something at the cost of something else. And what happens? You make a decision to get an item thinking “oh, hey, the negatives, can’t be that bad” and when the game lets you up on the next level you regret everything that led you up to this decision and realize why you make such poor real life choices. But hey, if having 3 lives for the whole playthrough by default wasn’t hard enough for you – well now it is my friend. Generally items can be obtained by either purchasing them at the beginning of each level or randomly from crates or treasures or even the vaccine machine (upon level up, of course). Each item has a rarity – there are common, rare, epic, legendary, and to be honest, yeah the legendary do give nice stuff but most of the time the only difference is the pricing (usually it’s 50 vaccines for common, 100 for rare and 200 for legendary … epic were 150 I think … I don’t remember though – something along those lines).

The game, however, provides, some chance of a second attempt and that is a respawn. However, respawning is seldom worth it, because of its cost. The first respawn costs 100, then it goes up to 150 and quite frankly I think the rate is +50 vaccine for each respawn, but I could rarely afford the 150 one, because if you don’t buy items, well you’re pretty much f*cked, unless you are a God at this type of games, in which case kudos to you. There is, however an item, that resets your respawn cost, but unless you are a millionaire in the game, it’s not very useful. Like I said, respawns are a nice, but very expensive, luxury, which I found myself using maximum once per playthrough. To be honest, it’s a safer bet to try and stay alive, than to count on respawns.

The controls are pretty standard – you walk with W, A, S, D and you can strafe diagonally, unlike shooting, which happens by using the arrow keys, however, shooting goes only in the four basic directions, them being up, down, left and right. You can make an attempt at a slight diagonal shooting, by moving along with it, but trust me, just position yourself, then shoot. Then you have your E key to interact with stuff (for example the vaccine machine, you go up to it, you press E and give it vaccine).

Since I did continue repeating “vaccine, vaccine”, that is the in-game currency, lest you’ve got that already. You gather vaccine from killing enemies or from crates/treasures and at the start of the game you begin with 100, which is a nice little bonus.

What does a level consist of? So you are in this 3D room thingy (I found out that the first room of the playthrough is always the same, just like the boss level, but other maps are randomly generated). The setting is this nice village-y, plain-y, whatever setting and I for one think this game looks adorable – both the setting and its characters (I gotta say, I did love that). Every level consists of a few waves of enemies. There is no time limit (thank god! this is the only thing I was missing right now … that was sarcasm), so the next wave will only spawn when you finish the previous one. The whole level consists of a few waves and sometimes you might get lucky and spawn a treasure along with your enemies. Treasures either give a huge sum of vaccine or some random item. You kill all the waves and go back to your rocket to proceed on up to the next level. In between levels the game offers you a set of 3 items to choose from. You can buy only 1 from the 3 (or nothing) and on that same screen we see out progress in percentages. I found out that my curse number for this game was 19.something % where I would usually f*ck up there amongst other places. You begin the game with 3 lives and 8 bullet capacity (thank god at least for the infinite ammo), though the reloading time is very unforgiving. I remember getting an item once, which made my capacity to 1 bullet and I had to reload after each shot … I did regret buying the item as you might have guessed, because at the time I was like “hey, this sh*t gives me +8 HP and damage increase, the slow can’t be that bad” … oh yeah, I wish a 15-seconds-later me could slap that past me and say “NO! ENOUGH WITH THE POOR CHOICES!” Anyways, game over is when you either die or beat the game.

Apparently it has only one level. I don’t even know if I can call it that … stage … playthrough … you get me! So when you complete that, after the end boss, you get to try again, there is no next stage, level … something.

Anyway, there is not really much more to say about Hypersensitive Bob. I’d say that it’s a nice little side game for just, you know passing time. I can recommend it to people who enjoy these types of games, because it’s a cute little experience, but I wouldn’t say that it has that much replayability value. The music, honestly, I was a bit disappointed. It was nice the first few attempts, but then I grew tired of listening to it, so I had to jam in my own music, while playing. However I will give it props for smooth controls and gameplay. So overall, I’d say Hypersensitive Bob gets a 7/10 from me. Could be done more with, but it’s a nice little distraction as it is now. I gotta mention, I was a bit skeptical about it at the start, but it’s a fun little experience to the very least.