It doesn't feel like this game is launching in early access in as strong a spot as Hades II or The Rogue Prince of Persia

Hyper Light Breaker's Roguelike Loop Didn't Engage Me, But I Want To Give It Another Chance

It doesn't feel like this game is launching in early access in as strong a spot as Hades II or The Rogue Prince of Persia

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Now Playing: Hyper Light Breaker Trailer | Summer Game Fest 2024

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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