There’s a lot you can do with the third dimension. Texture. Nativity scene dioramas. Bullets. A development of the 2D action game Hyper Light Drifter, Hyper Light Breaker decides to almost completely transform itself into a casual roguelike, trading post-apocalyptic pixel graphics for enormous proc-gen views and even more acrobatic sword fighting.
Unfortunately, its technical ambitions are undermined by the emptiness of the world, a lack of the fun of exploration that Drifter cultivated so well, and combat that’s more faithful to the original but doesn’t quite adapt to 3D. Not to mention it has more than its fair share of early access bugs and, especially in the early stages, balancing bugs.
On the other side of the universe, towards the scarred ruins of the Hyper Light Drifter, you are a Breaker, traveling from a (really quite neat-looking) urban settlement to Overgrowth: the colorful yet hazardous land of a great villain called the Void King. Go in, get better swords and weapons, kill the Crowns – the king’s lieutenants – and maybe you can attack the great man himself. It’s a largely conventional roguelike setup, except that you can end the streak through extraction rather than winning or dying, in which case you can keep your collected loot and prepare for a up-to-date raid.
Structurally it’s fine, and I like that the option to tactically fuck around in an extraction shooter style means you don’t have to commit to a boss fight for the large crescendo moment. And combat – the main activity in these runs – successfully mimics some of the best moves from the original game, including the excellent zoom dash. Gear-wise, I barely made exploit of the weapons, which seemed to need a lot of upgrades to match the deadly power of the blades, but I eventually latched on to a pair of razor claws, whose ferocious attack speed paired well with my dash addiction.
By the time version 1.0 is released, you should also have nine playable Breakers to choose from, each with two subclasses that change their starting stats and perks. Make an appointment and composed down all your expectations towards really crazy structures. Only three of these nine are currently available, and while their perks do optimize specific fighting styles, none of them are night and day apart from each other, and their stat upgrades are so reliant on ultra-rare resources that they take ages to customize. Rather, your approach will depend on whether you wield featherlight, balanced or ponderous blades, which vary much more in their attack patterns and special moves.
The bigger problem is that what works in two dimensions doesn’t necessarily translate well to 3D, at least without more fine-tuning than Hyper Light Breaker currently has. Once again, you’ll be sneaking through crowds of sci-fi monsters, whacking them with knives and occasionally unleashing battery-powered firearms. But whereas in Breaker you could handle these hand-to-hand combats thanks to your overhead view of the entire scrum, here you’re often just caught up in amorphous, graceless chaos, with too many economical shots coming from enemies who can pounce from outside third person camera view. Any semblance of Souls-level precision and finesse that Breaker still nominally enjoys – all but the smartest enemies force you to time your dodges and punish you for overexertion – are lost in these unrelenting storms of blades. The exception are a few mini-bosses, but even these are accompanied by crowds of creatures that eagerly turn duels into a mashfest.
As you can imagine, all of this makes for an extremely miserable first few hours, as you’ll be scrambling for basic gear upgrades and not even having access to health kits until it pops up a few times. Even after that, Hyper Light Breaker is strangely stingy with healing: it will take hours before you’re able to fill the skill tree enough to carry more than one, and depending on your build, it may not even fill the full bar. Nevertheless, the game happily pits you against overwhelming crowds and/or large boys with such gigantic HP pools that it may take several minutes of panicked hit-and-run attacks to defeat them.
One answer is to fight numbers with numbers. Combat becomes noticeably easier in co-op, with up to four players at a time, and the matchmaking seems shrewd enough to avoid pairing grizzled, gun-toting veterans with less experienced Breakers. I certainly started having more fun once I could mow down Overgrowth with another pair of blades, though adding more players will also exacerbate the durability problem with bosses and mini-bosses. The result: regular, consistently awkward observations of four identical cat ninjas hunting motionless stone golems in spectacular, if ineffective, fashion. Two players seems like the best solution, as it’s enough to take the pressure off that tedious initial period, not enough to populate the world with titanium-lined meatbags.
Still, at least it would be populated something. Progenerated Overgrowth can diversify the biomes you’ll fight at the surface level, as well as some of the stakes – die four times and the map will be rebuilt, erasing all of your previous Krona-killing progress. As a gaming space, however, it’s not as full of story and exploration as Drifter’s post-apocalyptic mazes. Half the fun of this game was finding its secrets, discovering tunnels and treasures that a less curious nose would never sniff out. Hyper Light Breaker rewards and collectibles are just… lying there in the open. Usually with a map marker indicating their exact location and/or inside a pasted structure that you visited in a previous run. It’s an open-world map designed in the Starfield style: technically unique, but without the thrill of discovering hidden rewards in its handcrafted nooks and crannies.
This isn’t the only feature of Hyper Light Drifter that Breaker is forgetting – or at least hasn’t implemented yet. For example, the slim layer of history is mostly restricted to a few collectible sketches depicting the Crown’s rise to power; beyond that, there’s no discernible narrative that you can develop yourself, or much further detail about the world you’re ostensibly trying to save. This is despite Breaker watering down Drifter’s presentation, which relied entirely on pictograms and fictional, coded language, to shower you with interfaces and item descriptions in plain English. Perhaps this is a necessary compromise in a game as full of loot as this one, but it still undermines the otherworldly atmosphere that was so carefully created in the first game. Even the music isn’t as evocative and atmospheric, with the synths remaining oddly restrained outside of boss fights and extractions.
Again, maybe this is something that could be improved in Early Access. Unfortunately, Heart Machine will likely have its hands full with a host of more detailed, more drastic bugs and crashes. Aside from some general performance issues, including the strain of four-player co-op that causes my RTX 3090 to struggle to hit 30fps at 1440p, Hyper Light Breaker is rife with minor issues: disconnected players keep showing up in the UI , Y-axis camera flip doesn’t work when aiming, enemies become imperceptible, enemies will get stuck in the level geometry until they pop out to get you hit… At one point, the Engineer mini-boss appeared, which took about three hits, and then he suddenly shot up into the sky like Team Rocket at the end of a Pokémon episode. At least this one rarely made me laugh.
What’s less witty is that this launch version doesn’t even have the completeness of the features of the alpha version. At least some of the Coronas are fightable Other Crowns act as placeholders, which means that on a deep run, you’ll likely fight the same sword-wielding wolf several times in a row. And as a grand finale to the disappointment, reaching the Void King himself reveals that he’s not actually in the game yet – you’re just shown a stagnant screen and you have to pay some of your resources to reset Overgrowth, just like you would if you hit the limit four deaths.
The true essence of a roguelike is not the climactic challenge, but the preparation for it: the combination of equipment and experience, and the primal pleasure of Numbers Going Up. While Hyper Light Breaker is unfinished and more than a little broken, its biggest problem is that the meaty part just isn’t very enjoyable. The combat is clunky, the progression is dizzying, and the world isn’t intriguing enough to motivate you to visit it over and over again. This makes for an awfully long to-do list, whether you have early access or not.
This Early Access review is based on the retail copy purchased by the author.
