SHOUT OUT - Lets talk about Hyenas, and Sega’s big cancellation mistake
Big monkey balls.
By Jonathan Garrett
02/10/23
NOTE: thatHITBOX Shout Out’s are not sponsored content. They’re games, developers, individuals, or issues that we want to highlight and share purely out of interest.
Hyenas is one of the best Beta’s we’ve played in the last three years. Whether or not it aligned itself with your own personal taste, it possessed razor sharp clarity of vision and knew exactly what it was aiming for; an unhinged looter shooter with an emphasis on reactive exploration. If Borderlands and Cel Damage had a weird amorphous baby, Hyenas would be the result. It makes this cancellation even more egregious, and a gigantic waste of untapped potential.
One could argue that there was too much going on to ensure broad accessibility; cracking vaults, PvE mixed with PvP, zero g movement and combat, looting and upgrades, character abilities, and randomised elements is a blender full of features that could run the risk of overwhelming new players. Somehow this wacky trifle of ideas coalesced into something unhinged and satisfying. It carved itself a neat identity, and even made me want to open myself up for public voice chat (which is something I generally avoid).
You’re thrown in and allowed to crack on, giving you room to figure things out for yourself if a dedicated tutorial isn’t your speed. It wasn’t long before experimenting with equipment and other upgrades became par for the course. The gunplay was fun, the late game was tense, and the mixture of features shouldn’t have worked as well as they did. Sega have made an enormous mistake here.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
