Hyper Light Breaker hands-on preview — extraction roguelike and real-life achievements

You need to take your wins where you can get them. Over the course of 22 years of playing video games as a member of the press and tackling unbalanced code, when a developer tells you “We don’t expect anyone will beat this boss – he’s unbalanced and will probably destroy you in a single hit” you start to take it as a challenge. So it goes with Hyper Light Breaker, the non-sequel to the wonderful Hyper Light Drifter from developer Heart Machine. We’ll get back to this in a minute, but let’s first talk about how this ambitious 3D battler bends the concept of roguelike in some very new ways.

To make demoing Hyper Light Breaker even possible, the team had to slap the handcuffs on it from the word go. You see, Hyper Light Breaker is heavily randomized and procedurally generated, so Heart Machine tweaked the formula to JUST 18 possible permutations. Something else the team has done to be unique, if you die in a run, you get another couple of shots at it. You’re also allowed to keep some of what you’ve cached, so bringing back a better kit is possible. I’m just happy that dying doesn’t mean having to wait several runs to try and finish the permutation I was working on.

It’s also tweaked to give us newbies a fighting chance. Plunked down in the same universe as Hyper Light Drifter (though again, not a sequel, so sayeth the developers), this game diverges from that one in every way you can imagine. First, the game has moved to 3D and with a non-linear open world. Equipped with a massive array of weapons (complete with MMO-style rarities) and a hoverboard to get around, up to three players are tasked with entering the Overgrowth to hunt down and destroy the Crowns and their leader, the Abyss King.

The Overgrowth is a realm in disarray. Twisted creatures roam the ever-changing biomes, and every playthrough is different. Massive dungeons, unique landscapes, dot a now-3D environment just waiting for you to explore. Our demo began with picking from the six available characters (Lapis, Vermillion, Ravinis, Rondo, Goro, and Toro being the revealed ones thus far) out of a total of nine. Each has unique strengths and weaknesses, weapons, gear, and archetypes. Ranger, Warrior, Lightweaver, and other class names might give you an idea of how they play out, but in practice it’s a whole different animal. Picking Lapis, I went up an elevator into a small hub town apparently set up specifically to be able to buy new gear, as well as to introduce us to the “holobytes”.

As I mentioned, weapon drops are split by type, but also by MMO-style rarity. These provide various stat buffs and occasional tradeoffs, not unlike an ARPG, but it’s the holobytes that provide the biggest modifiers. During our demo we could purchase/find and equip up to four holobyte slots, and these can change gameplay dramatically. A 20% bump to overall health or armor, faster reloads or weapon damage improvements, as well as passive and active powers are just a thimble out of the ocean that is this loot category. I saw this to be true between runs when I swapped out various holobytes, completely changing my loadout and making me far more effective as a result.

Back in the Overgrowth, our objective was simple – we were tasked with recovering lost memories by cleansing the land. Standing in our way are a group of bosses called The Crowns – boss fights that would test our equipment and our resolve. The first of which, the aforementioned Exus. To reach them, however, we’d need to take down the Elites holding the keys to the Crown Gates. The demo had been tweaked to only require one, but in practice it’ll require five to accomplish the task.

Using my hoverboard, wall-dash, dodging, parrying, and long-ranged weapons, I danced through foes big and small, eventually taking down the lieutenant to claim the key. At this point, I was once again reminded “we don’t expect you to take down this boss. Seriously, don’t feel bad if he just obliterates you…”, and after all – I looked over and he’d made David into a fine paste on the next station.

At its core, Hyper Light Breaker is an extraction roguelike, so I was taking my time learning my weapons, mastering the block timing, and gathering upgrades. Taking my hard-earned loot back to town, grabbing better weapons and holobytes would be the key to my success. Prepped and ready, I set out to slay Exus.

Using the key I’d pried from the cold dead hands of his lieutenant, I cracked open the Crown Gate. Inside stood a boss that looked like a bipedal wolf, complete with neon-soaked flames. Dodging his bigger swings and stabs, intercepting the ones I could reasonably parry, and doing a lot of stick and move strikes, I slowly whittled away at Exus. He backed off and spawned some helpers that I rapidly dispatched to keep the field cleared. Dodge, parry, dodge, parry, strike – Exus fell. The dev let out a sharp laugh and then popped over to grab another dev, who then grabbed a third. They all laughed and said “Well…so much for that! Congratulations, you are the very first person in the ENTIRE WORLD to beat this boss outside of the development team!” Achievement unlocked, baby!

I popped by a few times for various appointments and the Heart Machine devs would update me periodically. It turns out two other press members managed to take down Exus as well, but they were quick to add that I was, by a wide margin, the fastest – I destroyed him in under a minute.

So much of Hyper Light Breaker is going to be fleshed out during its Early Access period, but already I can see the potential. The enemies are fun and challenging (except those Flame Snails – those things are straight from the depths of hell…seriously), and the swordplay is tight. Gun ammo tends to feel a little stingy, and the hoverboard is way too slow, but that’s precisely what player feedback during Early Access is for, right? Thankfully, you won’t have to wait long to try it for yourself as the game will be available in Q3 of 2024. Based on how much fun I had solo, I can’t wait to get two more friends to join the fight.

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