HYPER LIGHT BREAKING

Hyper Light Drifter is one of the my favourite indie games of all time. It was such a well executed, emotionally charged, action adventure that featured a gorgeous pixel aesthetic and a haunting score. Furthermore, I also thoroughly enjoyed Solar Ash. The good news is that Hyper Light Breaker not only sees the studio return to the Hyper Light universe, but it also combines a lot of elements from their first two games.

Sadly, Early Access doesn’t have a universally accepted meaning. You can have games that barely work and have bare bones content, but you can also have games that are extremely polished, only require more content and are indecipherable from a full release .

Unfortunately, Hyper Light Breaker finds itself somewhere in the middle of these two definitions. Hyper Light Breaker can be a good to great game but it will require a lot of work and refinement in early access before this becomes an easy recommendation. Rest assured, if there is a studio that I have faith will turn something unrefined into a diamond by the end of Early Access, it’s Heart Machine as they have earned the benefit of the doubt.

STORY

Hyper Light Breaker is an open world rogue-lite that takes place in the same universe as Hyper Light Drifter, but decades earlier. Hyper Light Breaker is playable is solo or co-op with up to three players. You play as a Breaker, a member of an elite organization, who must restore civilization after an apocalyptic war.

If you have played any rogue-lite before, the premise is similar. Explore, Destroy, Loot, Upgradeand Repeat. Your mission is to explore the overgrowth in search of the truth, while trying to take down the ruler, The Abyss King. The overgrowth features huge open biomes, deep labyrinths and will be constantly changing thanks to a blend of procedural generation and hand crafted worlds. Each cycle will have a unique world that you will never see twice. You can be resurrected four time per cycle and each cycle will feature unique layouts, enemies and loot, which makes returning again and again a pleasure.

In between each run, you will be able to upgrade your Breaker through skill tree stats, accessing new abilities and gear, but the most important thing between runs is decoding memories that will help you piece together what has happened. Upgrading is important because early on, Hyper Light Breaker is quite unforgiving as you don’t even begin with a med-kit, you start with relatively low health to the damage enemies do and the world is very limited in health to find. These issues are exacerbated when playing solo.

One of the big departures from Hyper Light Drifter, outside of the obvious genre and perspective change is how combat has evolved. In Drifter, you had to be a dash master, but Breaker features parries and counters, leading to a deeper requirement from the player to always be engaged. This is at least in theory, as there are some mechanics in the game that require further refinement.

Currently, there are too many enemies that don’t communicate what their attacks will be or when. The lock on system also needs to be refined because it often disconnects, which then causes disorientation and sometimes death. Once again playing in solo feels much more difficult as all of the enemies focus will be on you only and they are relentless. You can instantly go from full health to dead in the blink of an eye, when you are surrounded by mobs of enemies of all types including snipers, dogs, flying enemies, and standard brutes.

One of the other areas that Breaker needs to improve upon is performance, especially on the Steam Deck, where games like this feel great. Thanks to a hot fix in the first few days, the frame rate stays in the 40-50 range, if all graphical settings are at their lowest, but for the demands of the combat, Heart Machine need to get this up to a 60. Just Light Hyper Light Drifter, Breaker wants to be a game will reward the patient player who makes precision moves as opposed to mashing buttons and better performance will help achieve this.

Hyper Light Breaker might seem like much has changed from the 2016 formula, but despite all of the changes, still manages to capture a lot of the essence from Hyper Light Drifter. The neon visuals, the synth laden soundtrack, icons, sound effects and isolation when you play solo. Heart Machine has without a doubt transplanted the universe of Hyper Light Drifter into 3D.

HYPER LIGHT ON POLISH

It might not be the same immediate success that Hyper Light Drifter was, but there is a lot of hope to glimmer from the first week of Hyper Light Breaker and this is the studios first early access title. The silver lining is that the core of Hyper Light Breaker is good and can be a lot of fun, but it’s going to need refinements, content and updates if it plans to stack up with the other Heart Machine titles or other legendary rogue-lites.