Hyper Light Breaker Had A Messy First Week With Signs Of Promise
The pseudo-sequel to Hyper Light Drifter is off to a rough start.
The beautiful, blisteringly difficult enigma that is Hyper Light Drifter still feels like magic, eight years after release. Its story is abstract to the point of incomprehensible, but still remains gripping. Combat is punishing in a way that verges on sadistic without ever feeling like too much. The whole game is heavily influenced by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but nonetheless feels utterly unique. Hyper Light Drifter hasn’t lost an ounce of its charm since its 2016 release — but it’s hard to imagine ever speaking about its new pseudo-sequel in such glowing terms.
Hyper Light Breaker, announced in 2022, is a different beast from its predecessor. The jump to 3D is the most obvious change, along with its move to procedurally generated open worlds and a shift from solo to cooperative play.
Hyper Light Breaker’s Early Access launch leaves a lot of room for improvement.
The basic loop of Hyper Light Breaker goes like this: You wake up in a hub world full of vendors where you can buy or upgrade your gear, then head out into the overgrowth alone or with a crew of up to three. In the overgrowth, you’re tasked with fighting your way to a series of beacons throughout the world while scavenging better equipment and perks. Lighting beacons unlocks three bosses, and defeating them opens a fight with the real villain, the Abyss King — or at least, it will once he’s added to the game.
It’s a functional, if uninspired, structure for Hyper Light Breaker, but one that needs to be executed impeccably to stand out from games with essentially the same premise. Hyper Light Breaker is still in early access, so of course it’s not all there yet, but after the game’s first week, it doesn’t feel quite ready to dive into, even by those standards.
There’s a lot about Hyper Light Breaker that just feels messy at this point. Your main means of locomotion in the Overgrowth is your hoverboard (big cool points for that), but it’s a pretty unruly way of getting around. Steering feels a bit too stiff, it doesn’t move that fast for how large the environment is, and you can only use it for a limited time before hopping off to recharge. It also has an irritating habit of getting hung up on inclines and bits of rubble in the world, and it’s hard to gauge on sight which hill or debris will give your board trouble.
Getting around Hyper Light Breaker’s open world is a challenge of its own.
You also have a glider (again, cool points), but it’s just as temperamental. Leaping off a tall enough structure will let you deploy it with the push of a button — or maybe you have to hold the button, or maybe double-jumping brings it out automatically? I honestly can’t tell, because it seems inconsistent when it chooses to appear, and more often than not pressing the button to deploy it ends up putting it away instead.
Combat feels a bit cleaner, fortunately, aside from your parry and dodge feeling just as sluggish and inconsistent. But when you’re in the thick of it slashing away with your sword and firing away with a blaster, it does call to mind a bit of Hyper Light Drifter’s excellent action.
The real trouble comes not from how combat feels, but how ludicrously difficult it is. The Overgrowth is littered with enemies flying or charging around, some firing at you from a huge distance away. Just about any time you get into a fight, it’s a lot to handle, which becomes an issue when you can only survive three or four hits to start. That’s not even mentioning the roaming minibosses, each of which is accompanied by a gaggle of lesser minions. One in particular that I kept running into has a massively damaging sniper rifle to pick you off at a distance, but swaps to a quick-firing shotgun with a massive spread up close, meaning there’s no real way to counter it. The real bosses are much the same, spamming incredibly powerful attacks with very little room to avoid them.
Hyper Light Breaker is stylish as hell, but that’s not quite enough.
Capping it all off is an equally punishing progression system. Throughout your runs in the Overgrowth, you collect various materials that you can use to upgrade or buy weapons back in the hub. I couldn’t even tell you how many different materials there are, as there are some I’ve yet to pick up. Frustratingly, weapons you purchase with your hard-earned currency disappear after you’re defeated a few times, making it easy to actually lose progress and end a run poorer than you started. It also discourages experimentation, since forking over your entire life savings to buy a weapon you’ll lose soon just feels bad.
Each trip into the Overgrowth only grants you four lives to beat it, and resetting that counter by rebuilding the world in a new form also costs you. That cost is a percentage of what you have, so you won’t get stuck with no way to return, but it again makes it feel like the tangible progress you made is getting wiped out before your eyes.
Co-op is absolutely the way to go in Hyper Light Breaker.
Hyper Light Breaker is clearly made for co-op rather than solo play, but adding more players also means more and tougher enemies to deal with. In co-op, the game is decidedly more fun, and you’re less likely to get picked off by a stray shot from offscreen, but it also means everyone needs to work together to make any progress, and that’s just not something I’ve seen with random players so far.
Even still, there’s something compelling about the core combat of Hyper Light Breaker, but it’s going to take a lot of work to make it worth playing. Developer Heart Machine has been quite responsive to player feedback so far, already deploying a patch to deal with some of the game’s biggest issues (like giving you a firearm to start, something that was bafflingly missing to begin with). The developer promises performance fixes, a progression and difficulty overhaul, and more to come. That means Hyper Light Breaker could one day be worth the pain if you gather a party of dedicated, slightly masochistic, friends, but it’s got a long way to go before it gets there.
