Hyper Light Breaker Early Access Impressions for PC

Platform: PC
Publisher: Arc Games
Developer: Heart Machine
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: Not Rated

Here are the main problems with Hyper Light Breaker: Iโ€™m terrible at it, I have no idea how to improve, and I donโ€™t know why I should care about any of it.

One of those things, obviously, is on me. While Hyper Light Breaker may bill itself as a rogue-lite, in reality itโ€™s more a souls-like โ€“ and, of course, the only way to get better at those is, of course, to get better at them. As someone whoโ€™s generally been bad at souls-likes, Iโ€™m not surprised that Iโ€™m bad at this one, too.

The problem, though, is that itโ€™s not at all clear how you improve. Thereโ€™s no real tutorial, save for a couple of screens that give you a vague explanation of the controls, and when youโ€™re in the game thereโ€™s little explanation as to what youโ€™re supposed to do. The game is clearly pushing you towards fighting a couple of bosses, except to get to them you have to fight your way through all kinds of enemies โ€“ and not only does the game never give you an explanation of what youโ€™re doing, it also makes all the enemies wildly overpowered (even the weakest enemies can take a massive chunk out of your health bar), and it makes it difficult to improve your weapons, and itโ€™s extremely stingy with its healing.

In fact, itโ€™s pretty stingy with nearly everything โ€“ in theory youโ€™re supposed to be picking up loot to carry over to your next run, but Hyper Light Breaker doles out resources in the most miserly way imaginable, so youโ€™re left hoping that you somehow stumble across some really great weapon or buff. Failing that, youโ€™re basically grinding for nothing (or so it seems โ€“ again, the game does a terrible job of explaining pretty much everything).

To sum up: your weapons suck, your attacks are ineffective, itโ€™s really easy to lose health and your chances to improve rely on luck to a very large extent. And, as far as I can tell, the story is basically non-existent, so you donโ€™t even know why youโ€™re doing any of it.

As bad as all that is, however, I wouldnโ€™t completely write off Hyper Light Breaker just yet. For starters, the game has a solid pedigree: developers Heart Machine didnโ€™t just create the gameโ€™s well-regarded predecessor, Hyper Light Drifter, they also created the very good Solar Ash. Whatโ€™s more, just like those games Hyper Light Breaker looks stunning โ€“ you may not know where youโ€™re going or what youโ€™re doing, but at least you can enjoy the scenery while youโ€™re stumbling around.

But at this point, thatโ€™s hardly reason to pick the game up. Since Hyper Light Breaker is still in Early Access, itโ€™s entirely possible the game could substantially improve over time (and, indeed, Heart Machine recently published their roadmap, and theyโ€™re promising lots of new content coming in the near future). But none of that is here now โ€“ so unless you have a very high tolerance for frustration, youโ€™re probably better off waiting and seeing what happens with this game.

Arc Games provided us with a Hyper Light Breaker PC code for review purposes.

Score: 6
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