Hextreme Void – PS5 Review

Hextreme Void is the latest of many auto-battling, rogue-lite games all following on from the great success of Vampire Survivors a couple of years ago.  This one comes to us by way of a little studio called Double Mizzlee and has been released by PSN’s most-prolific publishers Eastasiasoft.

The game is a little tricky to define though.  From our opening sentence there, you get a bit of a flavour.  It’s got that rogue-lite/Survivors thing going on which is to say that you make progression through the game and are asked to pick from a selection of perks every time you level up.  That’s easy enough to get your head around.  The auto-battling part maybe isn’t quite right.  It’s automatic for sure but unlike games like Vampire Survivors and Brotato, you don’t really control anything.  In terms of the actual gameplay, this game has no controls.

So how does it work?  Well, this is a brick-breaking game.  The sort of thing that Arkanoid popularised but you’re not placed at the bottom of the screen.  You’re not placed anywhere.  Balls bounce, they hit bricks, the hit the edge of the screen and they keep going.  There’s no way to lose balls once they are on the play area.  And each of those areas is a single screen, closed-off area.  You can’t affect the direction of the balls.  You’re just a spectator.

The way that you fail here is to run out of time.  Each run takes five minutes (or less if you complete it) and in that time you’ll watch balls bounce around the screen and all you can do is hope they clear the current level so that you can move onto the next.  There are fifty levels set across five groups (called ‘Voids’ for some weird reason).

All you can do to intervene and therefore win is pick from perks every time you level up.  There are no clever ones, no ‘fusions’ or ‘evolutions’ or anything like that.  You can add balls, increase the max ball total, improve ball speed and power-up the damage the balls do, either from regular or critical hits.  Aside from that you can also enhance your ability to collect coins.  Coins are used for permanent upgrades between runs.  These improve the same specs as well as enhancing how much XP you earn or improving the few temporary power-ups the game throws at you (such as multi-balls, balls that go through bricks and that kind of thing).

Here’s the thing.  Put all your coins into additional balls.   When you hit that limit, increase it and do it again.  Put a few coins into damage too.  Not many.  Four or five will do it.  Occasionally bump up the ball speed and damage a bit further if you’ve got spare change after buying all the additional balls you can.  Do that and eventually you’ll beat Void 1.  Do it a bit more and you’ll beat Void 2.  By the time you beat Void 3, you’ll basically be unstoppable.  Voids 4 and 5 will fall at the first time of asking and that will be that.  Game complete in less time than it takes to bake a pavlova.

And that’s really all there is to Hextreme Void.  It’s weird because it’s barely got any gameplay but what’s there is sort of enjoyable on a basic level for the first 20-30 minutes.  It can also be frustrating when one remaining block keeps getting missed by multiple balls while eating up time but that’s about as much resistance as the game will put up.  Add to that some very basic presentation that probably wouldn’t have made the cut on Xbox Live Arcade and that makes for a pretty underwhelming start for the rogue-lite genre in 2026.

On the plus side, it will provide a quick double Platinum (the identical PS4 version is downloadable from the same purchased) to those who celebrate.  But for anyone looking for their next Survivors-like addiction, this one isn’t it.  It’s not like there’s even anything to do once you get the all the trophies.  At that point you’ve seen and done everything.  You’ll be so overpowered that there isn’t even any point spending time getting the rest of your upgrades and so Hextreme Void ends up feeling like the early proof-of-concept demo for, potentially, a better game.  It’s just a shame that this is as far as they took the concept.  And with Ball X Pit existing as the fully fleshed-out version of this, you might as well just get that.