Hyper Light Breaker Early Access Review – Beauty and a beast

thesixthaxis.com:

Heart Machine certainly know how to make an artistically satisfying game. The first game in the Hyper Light series, Hyper Light Drifter, blended neon colours, gorgeous pixel art and tight action gameplay to create something that immediately stood out from the rest of the indie pack. They followed that up with Solar Ash, taking their penchant for awe-inspiring, idiosyncratic visuals and moving them to 3D. Once again, this showcased the strength of their world-building and action-heavy gameplay.

Hyper Light Breaker then, bears the heavy weight of expectation. As it launches into Early Access, fans of the series will no doubt delight in the world that’s been built here, but there’s a number of things that fundamentally need to change before it reaches full release.

Hyper Light Breaker is an open-world, procedurally generated Roguelite. As the genre dictates, that means there’s slow, incremental progress, starting off with next to nothing, making multiple runs into the game’s open world, and building up your character’s arsenal and abilities so that the next run will go just that little bit smoother. Hopefully, you’ll make it just that little bit farther.

There’s a reason that this is the gameplay style of choice right now: it’s rewarding, it’s challenging, and it can create longevity without needing an extensive narrative to drive it. Hyper Light Breaker takes the basic form of a Roguelite, but then layers its own quirks and design decisions on top, some of which work, and some of which don’t.

The first design decision is that Hyper Light Breaker is hard. Some of the difficulty seems to be because the team at Heart Machine expect, or perhaps hope, that you’re going to play in co-op with your friends. Damage and armour don’t scale here, and you can split enemies’ attention, so, when you factor in a couple of extra pairs of hands, it becomes wholly more approachable.

Co-op definitely lifts the whole experience – doesn’t it always? – but it also serves to highlight that the