The release of Hyper Light Drifter in 2016 was a standout moment in the indie gaming sphere, providing a frenetic top-down pixel action game with a unique take on storytelling overall immaculate vibes. Needless to say, the release of Heart Machine’s second game in the series, Hyper Light Breaker, had a lot to live up to in order to stand next to the glory of its predecessor. Now that the game is out in Early Access, and I was given the opportunity to try it out, I’m excited to see just how well this new title stands up!
Hyper Light Breaker
Developed By: Heart Machine Games
Platforms: PC
Release Date: January 15, 2025 (Early Access)
Since Hyper Light Breaker is still in Early Access, this won’t be something as definitive as a review. There’s still time for all sorts of changes, and the finished product could very well be completely different from what is available to play today. As such, I will instead offer a less structured “Review in Progress” that covers my general thoughts, praises, and criticisms for the newest venture into the colorful setting of the Hyper Light universe.
The Good
One of Hyper Light Breaker’s biggest goals appears to be translating its world from the original pixel-based mix of somber and colorful settings to a more fully-realized, three-dimensional place to play in and explore, and I can safely say that in this measure, Heart Machine has delivered in spades! From the moment you load into the game and enter the hub world, the aesthetic of Drifter have returned in full display – the pixel graphics have been replaced with a more cubist aesthetic that perfectly capture the feel of the original game, and the color saturation has been turned up to portray a much brighter and more impactful atmosphere. The characters look awesome, as well – reminiscent of their counterparts from Drifter but with the kind of attention to detail that is afforded a game with a more robust artistic palette.
The effects are also just as bright and flashy as fans of the first game would expect, but cranked up to new heights as the number of enemies and effects on-screen have been suitably increased as well. The combat has a fantastic visual feel to it as your Breaker leaves after-images of themselves where they once stood after every dash, leaping away from ominous bubbling explosives, laser sights that signal incoming projectiles, and slashing swords and claws from the never-ending stream of opponents that seek to cut your time in these gorgeous settings shorter than you’d hope.
On the subject of combat, the actual gameplay also feels very satisfying and relatively easy to pick up the basics of. Players have a spammable melee attack that can be charged at any time for a more powerful blow, as well as a special move unique to each weapon class that can be used on a cooldown. Ranged weapons are a bit more methodical, however, being completely unavailable to the player unless first holding down the aim button to bring up the targeting reticle. It is not particularly difficult to swap from releasing a flurry of weapon slashes into taking aim at a more distant threat, but it does require the player to give up their broader view of the environment for the moment in order to do so.
This is largely a good thing, however, as it provides incentive for the player to remain aware of their surroundings at all times, which feeds into the game’s other major success story: the exploration.
I’ve perhaps gotten a bit ahead of myself here: The core gameplay loop revolves around the player and up to two additional player-controlled Breakers spawning into a large, open-world environment in a random location. From there, the world is populated by new weapons, upgrades, secrets, and, of course, enemies. The players must brave the enemies and other hazards to find keys to open non-critical doors and prisms, much like the modules in Drifter, that open the critical path towards the Crowns – the big bosses of the world. After taking down 3 Crowns, you must face off against the Abyss King – the Big Bad of Breaker. The game gives you four lives to build up your arsenal to take on these Crowns, or to extract when the heat is on too high, in order to make your way to the Abyss King.
It’s that exploration of the world that may well be Breaker’s strongest aspect so far. Players get to travel the game’s absolutely breathtaking locales with style, utilizing a hoverboard and a glider along with the standard double jumps and air-dashes that also serve you in combat situations. There’s so much to see and find, from the numerous points of interest dotted across the map to even more secrets to be found in between them. There are even tricks you can do on the hover-board! Even with a stamina gauge limiting how much time you can spend traversing on your vehicles, Hyper Light Breaker doesn’t shy away from letting you check out the whole map from the moment you land in the world.
Simply put, there’s a lot to enjoy in the world of Hyper Light Breaker. It feels like a proper Hyper Light game, despite the big swings Heart Machine has taken with its presentation and gameplay, which is no small feat. Additionally, the fast-paced feel of the gameplay still manages to echo that of its predecessor in ways that cannot be ignored.
The Not-So-Good
If I could sing the endless praises of this game, I would be happy to do so, but my time spent with Hyper Light Breaker was not all sunshine and roses. There were a number of stumbles along the path to the Abyss King that left me feeling like there’s still some work to be done before the game’s full release.
The primary hurdle I experienced was also the most immediate: The difficulty. After exploring the hub area a bit, getting my bearings, and having the general gameplay expectations laid out for me, I was prepared for some trouble and fully expecting the first life to be a ‘trial run’ of sorts. What I hadn’t expected was to get laid out entirely by the first large monster I came across! Enemies are brutally unforgiving, dealing extremely high damage for even the most mundane of attacks. You have a parry, but the window for activating it successfully is very short, and it produces a shield that only covers a specific area of attack, so you’ll to be precise in both your timing and your positioning in order to negate incoming attacks. You’ll have to be very precise, too, because some enemies give very little in the way of a telegraph before the attack comes out, or will track fairly long distances from their starting point to ensure an attack hits even when it appears to be too far away.
Dying is likewise a major problem in Hyper Light Breaker. Every new weapon you pick up has a number of “lives” (usually just one), and every passive bonus you can unlock from defeating enemies comes with three. Every time you die, a life is deducted from your equipment, and if those lives ticks down to zero, it’s gone forever. Furthermore, every piece of equipment you claim from the map remains gone for the duration of your four-life run, so the more you die, the fewer options there are available to succeed. It’s incredibly easy to wind up in something of a death spiral, where a bad first attempt renders your run unable to be salvaged. It’s not a great feeling.
So don’t die, right? The game intends to punish you for over-staying your welcome in the open world, but gives you an extraction zone that you can use to leave at any point, which allows you to go back with equipment and bonuses intact the next time. Unfortunately, the extraction zone doesn’t simply allow you to leave without a fight, either. Activating the zone begins a multi-wave combat encounter as the Abyss King takes one last effort to claim your life and gear. You are given a decent health boost at the beginning of this, but even when you are prepared for what’s coming (and you likely won’t be the first time you attempt), it’s still all too easy to be overwhelmed by the odds pitted against you.
If you lose all four of your lives, then your run is over, and the spoils of the world will be reorganized and the Crowns left untouched once more. But to even get to that point, you are required to spend some of your resources simply to play again! It’s not that many, you’ll almost always have the required amount, but after being beaten down four times in a row, having to pay just to try again feels like adding insult to injury.
Speaking of resources, there are so many, and it’s never quite clear what purpose they all serve. There is a “blood” resource that is the most common and used to pay for things in the world, there are microchips which, presumably, can help upgrade your gear, there are gifts of some sort which are used to upgrade the vendors, as well as the aforementioned keys and prisms used to open pathways. Even foregoing the fact that upgrades to equipment feel like a bad idea when they are so easily lost on death, the sheer number of currencies to juggle feels more complex than is necessary for a non-live service type of game.
Ultimately, I think “complexity” is a perfect unifying theme behind most of my criticisms of the game. There are so many systems/genres at play here: Open-World exploration, Extraction elements, Roguelike “run-based” gameplay. None of them feel like they’re particularly meant to enjoy each other’s company, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, a lot of them feel so far like they’re at cross-purposes rather than working harmoniously. There are handfuls of currencies and so much information to convey that the textless, vibes-based motif of the original game had to be scrapped for more hard numbers and percentages. The combat engages you with so many different things at once that it becomes nearly impossible to emerge unscathed in a game that demands you conserve your health as much as possible. It’s possible that Heart Machine is aiming directly for the most hardcore gamers in all of these, but it’s hard to believe that in the wake of Drifter, which was a difficult but still very accessible game in ways that Breaker, so far, is not.
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot to like about Hyper Light Breaker, and there’s a lot more still that I want to like. The way the game plays with genre intrigues me, and the way it demands your excellence challenges me to want to pick the controller back up and try again. The multiplayer facet seems like a grand way to spend an evening with some friends. As it stands, however, there’s a lot about the game that feels more frustrating than enticing.
I don’t think that any of these concerns or criticisms are insurmountable, either. Heart Machine has already, in the few short weeks since their January 14th Early Access launch, released a hotfix improving some early concerns surrounding medkits and tweaking enemy damage and stunning capacity to lower the game’s difficulty somewhat. This is a dev team that very clearly wants to make the best product they can, and from what I can tell, nearly every issue that caused me pain is something that can be solved in the numbers. Less damage, more parry time, wider angles, fewer enemies. I don’t know exactly what it is, but I do know there’s a sweet spot to be found in all of these things that increases accessibility without sacrificing the grand vision. And I think Heart Machine is more than capable of finding it.
There is a phenomenal game hidden within Hyper Light Breaker, and between Heart Machine’s dedication and the Early Access gamers’ willingness to put themselves on the line to refine it, I’m sure that we’ll see something truly special by the time it hits 1.0.
