HYPERFIST Key Art
Image: Chirality & DigiPen

Much as big-budget AAA game development seems to be struggling, game design student projects go from strength to strength. 'Strong' feels like the right adjective for HYPERFIST. Made by Chirality, a student team from the DigiPen Institute of Technology, it's a short-but-sweet free FPS brawler about a shark-toothed anime punk pummeling his way through a dystopian cityscape packed to the gills with eyeball-shaped robot cops, all backed by a grungy punk soundtrack. Smashing the system is just a click away.

As the title suggests, there's no shooting to be done in Hyperfist (sorry to drop the capitalization), but there's a beefy character-action style combat engine to master here with air juggles and combos and a ranked scoring system for keeping up the aggression. Also, you don't so much 'jump' as 'uppercut so hard you launch yourself skywards', which is a fun gimmick, especially combined with the snappy, low-framerate animations of your giant robot fists.

No guns doesn't mean no ranged options either, as smaller enemies can be grabbed and thrown. I'm on the record as saying that one of the greatest joys in videogames is beating one dude up using another dude as a weapon, so always great to see it represented here. There's honestly a lot to like about the combat here, and I've got my fingers crossed that Chirality get to expand it into a full, commercial game, but I'm happy to replay what's here to maximize scores.

Interestingly, this one's also a bit more of a long-haul project than your average DigiPen student joint. An early demo (the first ten minutes of the game, give or take) rolled out back in March and saw several rounds of updates and iteration before today's full release. With any luck, there'll be more updates and tuning after today's launch, but for now, you can grab HYPERFIST (okay, we'll capitalize it again) now on Steam, completely free.