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: I’m terrible at it, I have no idea how to improve, and I don’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 it’s more a souls-like – and, of course, the only way to get better at those is, of course, to get better at them. As someone who’s generally been bad at souls-likes, I’m not surprised that I’m bad at this one, too.

The problem, though, is that it’s not at all clear how you improve. There’s no real tutorial, save for a couple of screens that give you a vague explanation of the controls, and when you’re in the game there’s little explanation as to what you’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 – and not only does the game never give you an explanation of what you’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 it’s extremely stingy with its healing.

In fact, it’s pretty stingy with nearly everything – in theory you’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 you’re left hoping that you somehow stumble across some really great weapon or buff. Failing that, you’re basically grinding for nothing (or so it seems – again, the game does a terrible job of explaining pretty much everything).

To sum up: your weapons suck, your attacks are ineffective, it’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 don’t even know why you’re doing any of it.

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

But at this point, that’s hardly reason to pick the game up. Since Hyper Light Breaker is still in Early Access, it’s entirely possible the game could substantially improve over time (and, indeed, Heart Machine recently published their roadmap, and they’re promising lots of new content coming in the near future). But none of that is here now – so unless you have a very high tolerance for frustration, you’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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