Picture the kind of spannerhead who would leave their starfighter’s charging cable unplugged, the day before the big Mission to Save the Galaxy. Picture the absolute wellington who’d lift off with that cable dangling behind their ship like a ribbon of bogroll flapping from the heel of a pub drunk. Picture the consummate cheesewinkle who’d then have to keep latching onto random satellites to replenish their ship’s batteries, while avoiding enemy fire.

*smash cut to Zaragoza-based headquarters of Hyperwired developers Sidralgames*

*game director rises to their feet in ecstasy*

“¡Sí! ¡Ese es nuestro piloto!”

Hyperwired is a chunky, busy, appealing and confuzzling top-down shmup in which, as preluded, you play the biggest fool in the Space Corps. In each procedurally generated level, you’ll skate around blasting lasers and missiles at waves of gremlins while tethering yourself to something with solar panels every few seconds to fill up your energy bar. The catch is that your cable is of finite length, so you’ll have a maximum radius while attached, though you can yank each satellite around a little.

“Plug n’ Shoot”, the devs whimsically call it all, as though they were introducing some kind of Fisher Price potty-trainer. If there’s nothing to plug into, you can launch a short-lived satellite of your own to generate some emergency power, but you only get one of those disposable satellites, to begin with.

Socketing into satellites is also how you’ll unlock power-ups, which include incendiary ammo and shields. I think that’s how it’s done, anyway. For all the efforts of the tutorial designers, I am pleasantly bewildered by Hyperwired. Even the early, thinly populated stages in the demo are a riot of harmful or helpful colours, and you can blast away the layout with certain weapons, to boot. There are also smaller, NPC fightercraft you can rescue and attach to a satellite to create a roving ally presence.

According to the developers, there are 40 upgrades for the game’s 10 ships, plus around 250 possible bullet modifier combos, which is quite hefty by genre standards. Probably the most important ability is your default slow-mo power, fuelled by hoovering up the fragments of smashed enemies.

It reminds me a bit of Galak-Z: The Dimensional, which Adam Smith (RPS in BG3) called “a smooth, polished and compelling arcade shooter that trades in tension and tactical awareness rather than screen-clearing power-trips”. The levels don’t seem nearly as large or elaborate, mind. Check Hyperwired’s demo out on Steam – the full game launches on 2nd July. There’s also an older prototype on Itch.io – this appears to have begun life as a gamejam project.