Hyper Light Breaker Early Access Launch impressions — A difficult new player experience

I loved what I played in my Hyper Light Breaker preview. It’s a fun, fast rogue-lite with intense combat, where the odds are always stacked against you. Of course, you can increase your chances of survival by bringing friends or taking the time to gear up. I also started out in a pretty good place thanks to the developers, and I feel like that’s what’s missing starting from a clean slate in the Early Access version on release.

Hyper Light Breaker is hard. That’s intentional, no doubt, but right now I think it’s way too hard for its own good. You start out with only a sword and the clothes on your back, and it feels like the game will try its hardest to take even that away from you. Having put multiple hours into the game now, I’m still basically exactly where I started, just with the shops unlocked now, so it currently plays more like a rogue-like than a rogue-lite.

Let’s talk about a typical run, as an example. You start out in your hub, where you can change your loadout, purchase new equipment using currency found out in the world, enter a multiplayer session, or head over to the portal to begin a run. There’s not much to do after a reset, so you’ll naturally just start a run.

Things start out fine, the world’s Crowns (AKA bosses) are shown on your map, and you need to go find the keys to open their boss doors before you can challenge them. These, along with most points of interest, are also marked on your map. To make sure you’re ready for the boss, you plan to grab the keys along with some new equipment and then book it to the exit teleporter before the danger meter can fill up too much.

It’s a smart play, but it often doesn’t go well. You’ll quickly find that fighting enemies as you come across them is a fool’s errand, because as soon as you finish off one wave another will spawn right on top of you. You just run past most fights because of this, making a b-line from one point of the map to the other. These points of interest where you’ll find better gear are also always guarded by enemies. Defeating them should let you access the loot in peace, but that never actually happens in practice.

Enemies deal an overwhelming amount of damage very quickly. Despite starting with 100 or so HP, you’ll realistically be able to take two to three hits before dying. You don’t start a run with healing items either, so what you see is what you get here. Assuming you survive a combat encounter, you still have the problem of enemies immediately spawning and ready to attack you the moment said encounter ends. So you might have to fight through several waves just to get a single key or item as you need to hold the interact button for a hot minute to open whatever’s holding the item, then actually read the description of the two choices so you can get a decent build going. Enemies will not give you a single moment of peace, so the opening and actually picking up parts are often separated by combat encounters.

The descriptions of these items are usually unhelpful. Some are plain and simple, like restoring all red HP upon performing an execution move, while others reference proper nouns and terms the game doesn’t really teach you about. I’m all for learning as you go, it adds to the game’s minimalist storytelling and mysterious atmosphere. While some are self explanatory, like the different weapon categories, I’ll never know what “Spiral Vents Activated” means or does unless it’s explained to me.

Death being incredibly punishing also doesn’t help me figure things out. Dying will remove one of your revives, and you only get four per cycle. Running out entirely will reset the world. I’m fine with that part, but individual deaths often stripping you of your equipment feels unfair. Each piece of equipment also has charges, with a death removing one charge. As you can probably guess, running out of charges will cause that piece of equipment to disappear completely. It feels a lot like the game kicking you when you’re already down.

The exit portals are the perfect example of this. Upon activation, they require you to defeat all enemies that spawn before you can get back to base. I feel like this should be more like a survival timer rather than killing everything, but whatever. Activating it also heals you for 50 HP, which is nice, but with so many enemies in close proximity all trying to kill you simultaneously odds are you’re still going to die. It’s impossible to keep track of so many enemy telegraphs at once, and your dodge and parry are woefully ineffective, with the former having such a tiny window of invincibility it may as well not be there and the latter being far too difficult to time. I do think escape should be difficult, you want the feeling of earning every scrap you get, after all, but dying here and losing everything you just got on that run is the worst feeling in the game.

I’m being very critical here, because I know that this game has some incredible heights, it’s just inhumanly difficult to get to them right now. Again, this is Early Access, and Heart Machine can and will smooth things out while keeping their original vision intact. The game has already received a patch addressing things like balance, performance, and balance. For example, you now have a default Rail (ranged weapon) in addition to your melee. As of writing, the game was updated again with even more changes, such as players now starting with a med kit for every run. I’m incredibly excited to see where they take the game, I just might have to take a break until it’s just a tad easier to beat that first Crown.

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