Hexical Review: A Novel Twin-Stick Disc That Deserves a Bigger Audience

A long road to a small, confident launch

Hexical didn't rush to market. ArchDrone Games showed it at Next Fest back in 2024, spent a stretch in closed beta gathering feedback, and originally planned an Early Access launch for early 2026 before deciding the game was "feature complete" enough to skip straight to a 1.0 release on April 9. That patience shows in the finished product: this is a small game from a small team, but it doesn't feel unfinished or thrown together, and the developer has kept shipping specific, substantial patches well after launch rather than treating release day as the finish line.

The hook: a disc, not a gun

Where Hexical earns its "unique" label — a word more than one reviewer reaches for independently — is its core weapon. You're the unnamed program tasked with delivering components through a hostile digital world, and instead of the usual stream of bullets, your main tool is a physics-based disc you launch and recall. One reviewer described it as "a bouncing ball that can be launched and summoned as your weapon," and it changes the rhythm of twin-stick combat noticeably: you're thinking about trajectories and recovery timing, not just aim and fire. Another reviewer called it "one of the most unique games to come out in quite a while," and while the review sample here is small, that reaction is consistent across every review in it.

Modifications: the real long game

The disc is the hook, but the modification system is where Hexical's depth actually lives. Modifications are found through exploration and level completion, and — in a nice bit of systemic design — they upgrade based on how much you actually use them in a run, rather than through a flat currency spend. Steam's achievement list makes the scale of this system obvious: there are 36 achievements, the overwhelming majority of them tied to fully upgrading one specific modification — Bash, Teleport, Thorns, Light Line, Strike, Heal, Scatter Shot, Turret, Necromancer, Mine, Shockwave, Ripper, Rage, Overclock, Guard, Echo, Admin Bomb, Armor, and more. Roughly half of players (48.8%) get far enough to earn their first upgrade, but the drop-off after that is steep — most individual "fully upgraded" achievements sit in the low single digits, and the achievement for fully upgrading every modification sits at just 1.1%. That's the signature of a rogue-lite built for dozens of runs' worth of experimentation rather than a quick clear, which lines up with the reviewer who logged over 1,000 minutes and still only left a two-word review: "Light disc!"

Fighting through three viral bosses

Structurally, the run is built around delivering components while working toward freeing "the Librarian" and defeating three viral aspects — bosses tied to Insect, Mucus, and Heat themes, each with their own defeat and survival-based achievements. Reviewers single out the "changing environment" and evolving world as the game progresses, and the aesthetic pulls its weight: one review called the whole experience "a total sensory explosion" with a "neon-soaked arcade" feel, and another compared the look to "a cyberspace petri dish teeming with alien neon life" — unusually vivid, specific language for a six-review sample, and a sign the presentation is landing with the people who've tried it.

Support that didn't stop at launch

What separates Hexical from a lot of similarly-sized indie launches is the patch cadence after release. In the weeks following 1.0, ArchDrone shipped a steady stream of specific fixes: controller UI navigation improvements, a fix for a crash when a worker drops a data packet while scared, boss balance adjustments, VSync and resolution-scaling corrections, a particle-density graphics option, and — most recently — a full new "Trick Shot" update adding a bank-shot modification and three new enemy types (a charging Dasher, a bomb-lobbing Bombard, and a shielded Ticker). That's real, ongoing support for a $14.99 release from a small studio, not a one-and-done launch.

The catch: almost nobody has reviewed it yet

The honest caveat here is scale. At the time of writing, Hexical has exactly six written reviews, all positive, and playtimes among that handful range from 14 minutes to over 1,000 — a spread wide enough that it's hard to say with confidence how the broader audience will respond once more people find it. Nothing in the available reviews or patch notes points to a serious flaw, and the pre-launch history suggests a team that listens (the "Getting Closer to the Finish Line" post explicitly credits 2024 Next Fest feedback for reworked gameplay), but a game this early into its review life deserves a note of caution alongside the praise.

Is $14.99 fair?

For a single-developer-scale rogue-lite with one weapon archetype and three bosses at launch, $14.99 sits toward the upper end of what similarly-sized genre entries ask for. The counterargument is the modification system's genuine depth — 36 achievements' worth of build variety is a lot more than most rogue-lites at this price offer on day one — plus a developer who's clearly not walking away after launch, given the pace of the Trick Shot update and the fixes before it. It's not an impulse-buy price for an unproven six-review game, but it's a defensible one for a genre fan willing to bet on a team with a demonstrated habit of following through.

Verdict

Hexical is a confidently made, unusually mechanically fresh twin-stick rogue-lite from a developer who spent years getting the core feel right before shipping and hasn't stopped tuning it since. The disc-based combat and use-it-to-earn-it modification system give it real staying power for players willing to put in the runs, even if the review count hasn't caught up to the quality yet. Worth seeking out if you want a rogue-lite that isn't just another bullet-hell reskin.