Heart Machine’s new game, Hyper Light Breaker, takes inspiration from its predecessor, Hyper Light Drifter.
Hyper Light Breaker is the forerunner to Hyper Light Drifter, even if the two seem to have nothing in common story or gameplay-wise. Although Breaker is a rogue-lite 3D action game, Drifter resembles 2D Valhalla.
From one of three characters, you rush out into the world, defeat a boss, and ideally return alive with all your riches intact. Though there is actual dialogue this time outside of those, Breaker carries on that lineage with some stunning images and understated narrative moments you can uncover. Drifter tells a simple story and features some incredible pixel artwork.
Every cycle in the four-cycle universe of Hyper Light Breaker plops you into represents one life for the Breaker you have chosen. Even with the SyCom capabilities working as subclasses of sorts, breakers are characters in this game and behave something like classes even though the three accessible at this moment all seem pretty similar.
Regarding the characters, every one of them may sprint, dash, jump, utilize melee attacks, run rails for firing, and more. On a hoverboard, which enables you to travel across the water as well, you may also cruise around.
Your character feels wonderful to handle, with weapons holding plenty of weight, parries making sense, and a general movement feeling great. Combat would most definitely feel amazing if this were a game where you traveled the beautiful environment and came into lone enemies. But you will almost always run across big crowds chasing you to the absolute end of time.
The combat is solid enough, with a good variety of weapons and skills and tight evading techniques. Still, decent does not mean thrilling. After a few plays, the fights felt repetitious, and the procedural creation did not keep the action interesting enough.
Though often depending on cheap difficulty spikes rather than creative design, boss confrontations are supposed to be highlights, but they often feel more stressful than satisfying.
The hoverboard and glider mechanics have potential, but the movement doesn’t feel as fluid or exciting as it ought to. Particularly, the hoverboard represents a lost possibility. It is slow and lacks the excitement you would find from zipping across a vivid, strange terrain. Given a game so oriented on discovery, the traversing ought to have been more fun.
Hyper Light Breaker’s goal is to gather these materials, known as prisms, and slay all the bosses on a dynamically created terrain every cycle. These prisms are now necessary for you to question superiors. Once all the bosses die, a cycle will finish.
Every map, I find, has numerous bosses graded in complexity based on the number of keys required to access them. Every trip, you set out to battle elite mobs, grab their keys, and eventually destroy the matching boss. You plot your own path across the map to visit sites of interest for resources and upgrades along the way.
In certain other contexts, like the zippiness of Hyper Light Drifter enhanced by Breaker’s more diversified weaponry, combat is clearly satisfying. Heart Machine’s reading of the classic third-person melee book is exact: normal attacks, charged attacks, dodges, blocks, parries, and enemy staggers. Engages, particularly against bigger groupings, have a more tactical rhythm. Though anywhere but the respawn site, spamming light attacks will quickly get you nothing.
You lose a revival once you pass away in this game. This was rather frustrating for me since you also lose charges on your gear, and if you run out of charge, all of your gear things just vanish, and you have to go on your next run without that particular gear item.
Any decent roguelike, of course, knows that one thing worth doing is dying and the gradual crawl toward more skill and better stats. I am not new to the genre; in fact, I routinely fill my bag with death, suffering, and better loot from the roguelike mines.
Though Hyper Light Breaker fails this specific test pretty horribly, one of the most crucial elements of any roguelike is how quickly you can get back into a run. From your death, it takes a few minutes to enter the following run; it is excruciating.
You now have four of them by default and do a cycle change when all four of them run out. Death relates to your character; cycles relate to the globe; the world will remain the same when you die but will also alter depending on the cycle you do. You will return to the cursed outpost, your main hub location, where you may interact with vendors, upgrade equipment, obtain meta progression, etc., upon death.
Since it is an extraction game, you can gear up again if you wish; otherwise, you can simply jump straight back into your run. Items you remove can be used later. As far as points of interest go and the actual environment itself is concerned, it will remain the same whether you gear up and jump back in.
Things might be a little bit different within the same cycle. For example, you might have different monster spawns, such as their location or type. Once you run out of revives, you will have completed a cycle; essentially, you get rewarded for dying, which I find quite objectionable.
But the completion of cycles sort of offers you a performance assessment at the conclusion of cycles, a report to kind of grade you for how well you performed throughout that cycle, and then the points you acquire get translated into progress towards meta-progression materials.
Remind you, and they have a lot of things you should have ready for you at the start of the game locked behind meta progression, which reminds you to die four distinct times or entirely beat all the bosses in Hyper Light Breaker.
Following that, until you finish a cycle, you do not have hand-healing powers. These are essentially what you can spend money on, though; they are gold foils in the top right here. They apply to items like medkits, stamina, hover, and glider times.
Overall, it’s not entirely horrible by any means; the combat has a lot of gloss to it when it works, and the several weapons and build options all give some good variations. But the dependence on ranged weapons in a game that makes them seem so constrained is confusing.
It is simply not where it should be right now. Though it will be a lot of fun to play with friends, I hope that Hyper Light Breaker will develop other battle items and gear into the game, which will be a great fit for now.
Though they lack the handcrafted appeal, memorability’s charm, and meticulous attention to detail that made Hyper Light Drifter so outstanding, the settings in Hyper Light Breaker are really gorgeous. The biomes seem clearly different at first, but with more time spent on them, you find how similar they are.
Conversely, some layouts and patterns are just too repeated; the procedural generating is not very excellent at disguising its seams. Furthermore, the planet is dead. Of course, there are resources to acquire and adversaries to fight; nevertheless, I could not detect any spirit. Moreover, there is nothing to explore.
Hyper Light Breaker is a mixed bag visually. The day-night cycle is a great addition, and the pastel-saturated landscapes and vivid neon sky are rather lovely. But something is lacking: something that ties the beauty of the earth to its utility. Having great vistas and having to spend hours grinding through them without improving your relationship with the surroundings is not exactly pleasant.
For me, the music is not quite good. Not one exception is Breaker; Heart Machine is naturally gifted in crafting evocative soundscapes. Possibly, the only thing that always works is the electronic music, which would be ideal for the appearance of the game.
This is a developer’s game ambition whose core was not fully realized in one Hyper Light Breaker. On the mechanic’s note, procedural generation is somewhat too positive and generic, including the art story direction. The music is too vague, and the gameplay combat loop becomes tedious far too quickly.
If you are a Hyper Light Drifter lover, you might experience some happy feelings even though Breaker’s predecessor is not even playing as well. To be new lets players down when you may realize some shallow Breaker fun, but it lacks the required depth and polish to keep you involved.
After spending several hours playing Hyper Light Breaker, overall, I left feeling more annoyed than having fun. Although upgrades throughout its early access phase could help it to improve, as it stands, it is difficult to advise.
While I was drafting my review yesterday, developers delivered a patch that came with several enhancements to performance, visuals and controls, steam deck compatibility, and the squashing of major issues. Perhaps you can give Hyper Light Breaker a go if you’ve liked Hyper Light Drifter since the devs are actively working on fixing the issues.
