There are many things you can do in the third dimension. Texture. Nativity Diorama. sphere. Hyperlight Breaker chooses to remake it almost completely as a free roguelike when expanding from the 2D action of Hyperlight Drifter.
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Sadly, its technical ambition is tainted by the emptiness of its world, the lack of exploratory joy that the castaways have cultivated so well, and combat that is more loyal to the original, but not fully adapted to 3D. Needless to say, it has a fair share of early access bugs, more than balancing failures, especially in the early stages.
As for what may be the other side of the universe to the ruins of the Hyperlight Drifter scars, you are a breaker and distorted from the (really looking pretty neat) city status to overgrowth. Enter, get a better sword and gun, kill the crown – kill the li in the king, and perhaps you will get a pop on the Big Man himself. It is primarily a traditional Roguelike setup, allowing you to save the gathered booty and maintain the tool for fresh intrusion, except for the opportunity to finish running by extraction rather than win or loss.
Structurally, that’s fine. The extraction shooter style tactical fucking option means you don’t have to commit to boss fights for big crescendo moments. And your main activities during these running will successfully replicate some of the best moves of the original game, including its excellent zoom dash. Gearwise, I realized I was barely using my gun. This appears to require multiple upgrades to match the killing power of the blade, but it eventually attached to the Razer’s claws, which combines dash poisoning with ferocious attack speed.
For version 1.0 roll rounds, you will need to select nine playable breakers. Each playable breaker has two subclasses, each re-jagging the starting stats and perks. It really is a quirky build, soothes the mind and mind. Only three of these nine are available now, and although perks optimize specific fighting styles, you don’t feel different from each other day, day or night. Statistics upgrades require age to personalize them. Your approach is more likely to be governed by light, balanced or heavy blade swings, with much different attack patterns and special movements.
The bigger problem is that what works in 2D is not necessarily well converted to 3D, at least without any tweaks or tweaks that the Hyperlight Breaker is currently running. Once again, you’ll be flying around among the crowds of sci-fi monsters who slap them with knives and occasionally loosen their battery-powered firearms. But in Drifter you can manage these brawls thanks to the top-down view of the entire scrum, but here you’re often caught up in a shapeless turmoil with too many cheap shots, with too many cheap shots of graceless, with cheap shots from enemies that can jump in from outside the third camera view. Similarity of precision and finesse like Souls, where the breaker is still nominally enthusiastic, forces loosening of all timing except for all but all but the softest enemies, punishing excessive extension. Some mini-bosses offer exceptions, but these also come with a flock of minions who are happy to turn Duels into a mashfest.
As you can imagine, all of this is a particularly miserable time in the first few hours. There you will be scrubbing basic gear upgrades and you will not be able to access the Medkit until you run a few times. Even after that, Hyperlight Breaker is soothing and oddly stingy. Nevertheless, this game is pleased to welcome you against overwhelming crowds and big young people with such a huge HP pool.
One answer is to fight numbers with numbers. In cooperatives, combat is significantly more manageable, allowing up to four at a time. Matchmaking looks so clever that it can’t combine registered veterans with experienced breakers. I certainly started to get more fun when I was able to mow the overgrowth with other blades, but adding more players also exacerbates the tankiness issues of bosses and mini bosses. The result: in a static rock golem, it is a regular, always troublesome sighting of four identical Catboy ninjas, not spectacular but effectively captured in spectacular fashion. The two players feel like sweet spots, enough to remove some of the pressure from its oppressive early period, not enough to fill the world with titanium-covered meat boxes.
Still, at least it’s entered something. Overgrowth of the process can add surface level diversity to the biome you fight and some bets – after 4 deaths, the map will re-recover again, wipe off any progress that adorns the previous crown. But as a game space, it is not something famous and exploreable, like Drifter’s apocalyptic Warren. Half of the fun of the game was running around its secrets. Hyperlight Breaker rewards and collectibles are a bit… lying there and going outside. Typically, map markers locate accurately and identify inside copy deprecation structures that have been visited in the previous run. It’s an open world map design Starfield Way: technically unique, but withstands the thrill of discovering prizes hidden in handcrafted corners.
This is not the quality of a hyperlight drifter that the breaker has forgotten or at least not yet implemented. For example, the micron thin veneer of the story is limited primarily to several collectible sketches depicting the rise in power in the crown. Beyond that, there is no obvious story that you can advance yourself, nor is there much detail about the world you are allegedly trying to save. It also showers in plain English with interfaces and item descriptions, despite the breakers watering the presentation of drifters, which rely entirely on emojis and fictional coded languages. Perhaps that’s a compromise necessary for a game that’s as looted as this, but it abandons the otherworldly vibe that the first game was so carefully crafted. Even the music is stimulating and unatmosphere. That synth remains oddly reserved outside boss fights and extraction.
Again, that could be something that could be even more tweakable for early access pipes. Unfortunately, the Heart Machine has many Nittia, Grittier bugs, breaks, and can fill up your hands. Beyond some general performance issues, including four-person co-op tension, hyperlight breakers are hardly an issue as they struggle to cough 30fps on their RTX 3090 at 1440p. And he got about three hits, and at the end of the Pokemon episode he suddenly ran towards the sky like a Team Rocket. At least that gave me a rare laugh.
What’s not very interesting is that this boot version does not have the alpha build functionality complete. There are at least some combatable crowns other The crown, which acts as a placeholder, will see it fighting several times in a row against the wolves wielding the same sword in a deep run. And, in an overwhelmingly epic finale, reaching the King reveals that he himself has not actually been involved in the game either. You will need to view a static screen and pay a portion of your resources to reset overgrowth, just as if you reached the 4 death limit.
The authentic meat of Roguelike is not fair, not a climactic challenge, but a primitive delight in gear and experience, and rising numbers. As long as the Hyperlight Breaker is unfinished and more than just a slight break, the biggest problem is that its meat portions aren’t that fun. The battle is troubling, progress sounds slow, and the world is not as interesting as it motivates repeated visits indefinitely. This will create a very long to-do list, early access, or no.
This early access review is based on retail copies purchased by the author.