Developer Fair Weather Studios has a good elevator pitch for its upcoming game Hyper Empire: What if you can play a 4X game in under 40 minutes?
4X strategy games, your Civilizations, Endless Legends and the like, are famous for being absolute time sinks. It’s a feature its core fanbase love,to some extent—a lot of these games allows the options to adjust the pace of the game so it uses up less turns. A full game takes hours to complete. A full game of Civ VII can go up to five hours.
So Hyper Empire is offering the vastness of a 4X game in a relatively bite size. 40 minutes tops.
Hyper Empire is a sci-fi themed 4X game, and features all the four Xs as you’d expect: explore, expand, exploit and exterminate. Pick one of the five available faction (each having unique mechanics) and attempt to win via pursing one of the multiple victory paths available.
Hyper Empire has auto-battles, random events to shake up each game with unexpected encounters, trading routes and pirate raids and the ability to recruit heroes to bolster your empire.
Hyper Empire has a demo available right now as part of Steam Next Fest. So you can see for yourself if the game lives up to its claim of a fast and short 4X game.
UPDATE 1/3/25: Hyper Empire was previously set to release on March 14, but has been recently delayed by three weeks. It will be available on April 4.
Hyper Empire launches on April 4 on PC (Steam).