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Something about Hyper Light Breaker just isn’t working for me. Having played about 30 minutes of the game at Summer Game Fest, I left my time with the game not really wanting to play more of it. And for a roguelike, that feels like a pretty big problem. Granted, the snippet of the game I got to play isn’t reflective of the whole experience, but if you’re going to sell me on a roguelike, you need to show me what part of the cycle is designed to incentivize me to keep playing.
2024 is looking to be a great year for roguelike’s launching in early access already with the likes of Hades II and The Rogue Prince of Persia providing plenty to play. The entire time I was playing Hyper Light Breaker, I kept thinking of those games;Hades II with its incredible story and characters that encourage me to keep playing and uncover the next chapter, and The Rogue Prince of Persia and its narrative bread crumbs that make me feel like a time looping detective. I didn’t get that from my time with Hyper Light Breaker. I didn’t get much of any story nor any indication of how the roguelike formula would inform that game’s narrative. Which is not to say that that element won’t be there in the main game, but I didn’t see it in what I played.
And without that hook, Hyper Light Breaker just feels fine. It’s a familiar loop if you’ve played a roguelike before. You start in a hub where you can purchase better gear and weapons, and then jump into a world that incorporates enough similar landmarks to familiarize yourself to the world’s layout run to run but randomizes the exact placement of enemies, items, and bosses. Your goal in the game is to find specific enemies in the world who drop keys to the arenas of the five bosses you have to defeat. The order in which you want to fight these bosses is up to you.
The main feature of Hyper Light Breaker is that you technically don’t have to complete this objective in a single run, like most roguelikes. Not only do you have multiple lives per run, but you can extract from the area and return to the hub in order to spend collected currency on new items and weapons before diving back in. Extracting and redeploying seems to be an important part of the loop. Choosing to do so initially seems like a risky endeavor–a beam of pink light appears on the map and you have to reach it while evading a powerful enemy that’s chasing after you–but in practice it’s surprisingly easy to escape. The bounty hunters aren’t very smart and your hoverboard and glider makes it a breeze to get around. All these benefits in the player’s favor stack up, incentivizing you to keep extracting.
The game also felt unbalanced in many ways. Though I enjoyed the moment-to-moment of the game’s combat–relying on slick counters and pulling off well-timed shots and sword slashes to cleave my way through groups of enemies is a good time in most action games–some of the upgrades you can randomly find seem grossly overpowered. The most noticeable example was one that summoned a massive AI-controlled companion–I brought it with me into one of the boss encounters and it tanked everything the boss threw at it while pulling its aggression. So not only could I safely hide behind my summon, the boss straight up ignored me as I kept shooting it. The whole ordeal felt cheap and I didn’t feel good about that victory. I hadn’t strategically overcome the threat, I had instead stumbled into a way to potentially cheese my way through the rest of the game.
Now, for all I know, that summon could have been useless against the other four bosses–I only saw and fought the one before my preview was over. And since Hyper Light Breaker is launching in early access, there’s an opportunity for the devs to balance the game further ahead of its full release.
Plus, there are huge parts of the game I didn’t get to see. I didn’t get to try out the game’s three-player co-op or explore the map beyond the initial area. And, like I said at the top, I know there’s some sort of story in Hyper Light Breaker but those elements were absent from my preview, leaving me wondering why my character was doing anything that they were doing.
I feel like my big takeaway from my time with Hyper Light Breaker is that I need to give it another chance. This first impression wasn’t very good–between a lack of narrative incentive to engage in the game’s roguelike gameplay loop, and elements of the gameplay feeling way too easy, I wasn’t blown away by the experience. But games launch in early access for this very reason, and it’s possible that most of my concerns won’t be in the game when I play it again.
Hyper Light Breaker is scheduled to launch in early access on PC later this year.
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