Hyperlight Destroyer Early Access Review

Normally when a sequel that's wildly different from the original is announced, I welcome it with open arms – look at my thoughts on Banjo-Kazooie: The Nuts and Bolts as evidence. But after playing a dozen hours with Hyper Light Breaker, the follow-up (though not really a sequel) to one of my favorite indie games of all time, Super Light Drifter – I feel like Vito Corleone telling you to look at how they slaughtered my son. It's clear that the bones of a great action RPG lie hidden in this challenging co-op roguelite, but it's currently buried deeper than the sun can see, thanks to sloppy combat mechanics and sloppy exploration. It's shallow and frustrating, and lacking in content it feels repetitive once you're done playing it. A few hours. Of course, this is an Early Access version of it, so there's always hope that the initial rough patch will get better given enough time, but as it stands now it's largely disappointing.

The goal of each run is to scour a random map for better gear and key items before fighting three highly lethal and extremely annoying bosses, before returning to base to regroup, buy some upgrades, and do it all again. The procedurally generated world that you and up to two friends will spend most of your time exploring at least looks pretty nice, using a unique art style that does a good job of conveying the atmosphere of 3D Ultra-Light Drifters. But these repetitive areas were incredibly difficult to navigate, filled with awkward cliffs and curving landscapes that felt like I shouldn't actually be climbing them, but I had no choice. On the plus side, they at least gave you a neat hoverboard that you could ride on and do some stunts on, and while the controls were just as sloppy as everything else, the hoverboard did still suck, and there were definitely some good times. .

Sadly, the same cannot be said for the bland hack-and-slash combat. There's nothing interesting about the melee attacks you take, the alternative third-person shooting option has very limited ammo, movement and dodging feel unresponsive and inconsistent, and the lock-on system keeps accidentally turning itself off, getting me and my crew members killed So many times – that I stopped using it entirely. Couple that with the fact that you're constantly surrounded by mobs that are often ubiquitous and annoying rather than fun, and Super Light Destroyer can be downright annoying. You'd better hope you have some friends willing to help you run, because things feel even worse when you're playing alone, as there doesn't seem to be any form of scaling to compensate for your reduced manpower.

These things are especially frustrating when Hyper Light Breaker is balanced to be so instantly difficult – I mean Very Difficulty, and that comes from people who have achieved everything in an ax – but doesn’t bother to explain its rules and often punishes you with enemy attacks that feel cheap. It's also interesting that you don't start out with any healing items (and only get them at a hefty cost and extremely frugal cost) when you think you'll need them most when you start learning. Instead, you basically have to put yourself into impossible situations until you're able to unlock the bare minimum necessary to survive.

In the current version of Hyper Light Breaker, there are only two of the three planned bosses: a giant sword-wielding wolf named Dro, and a melee warrior who uses fire magic named Ekko. Exus. Both are incredibly sloppy fights, with minions being endlessly summoned and bosses tumbling erratically to deal massive damage. Taking on these powerful leaders alone is simple enough, but when you're constantly bombarded by the same highly lethal enemies in the open-world areas, an already challenging encounter becomes downright annoying. This also means that if you want to win, you'll pretty much need to play against them with a full team of three players, with at least one person focused solely on crowd control. If your teammates hesitate in combat, you'll quickly find yourself in an almost hopeless situation and being swarmed to death. To add insult to injury, you have to defeat the more annoying Dro of the two fights twice to complete a run in place of a third unique boss that hasn't been added yet. Even if you manage to make it this far, you'll be informed that the final boss, Lord of the Abyss, won't be available until your game is over, and you'll be sent back to start a new game.

Unfortunately, Hyper Light Breaker doesn't currently give you enough reasons to keep playing after that. Sure, you'll unlock little perks that make you stronger and make runs more manageable, but there's nothing new to see or do once you go back. Simply making it easier to complete on later runs also feels quite backwards from the Roguelite formula, which often required you to turn on things like the difficulty modifier so that the challenge level would keep up with you in exchange for bigger rewards. These are not found in Hyper Light Breaker yet. Even the two alternate characters you can unlock only have a few stat changes and one unique perk to differentiate them – though playing as a surfer ninja raccoon is at least aesthetically pretty.

The lack of any unique or powerful loot also caused my interest to wane, especially once I finished a round or two. You'll find several different types of melee and ranged weapons, from hulking greatswords and lightning-fast claws, to peashooter pistols and powerful shotguns, but there are common and very weak versions of these items versus rare and powerful ones. The version is very similar to what you'll unlock along the way, just with some extra damage added over time, some small perks like restoring health when executing enemies, or some other small benefit. Completely missing from the item pool are any crazy game-changing options that could drastically increase your effectiveness in combat or change the way you approach a particular run.

Finally, and least surprisingly, Hyper Light Breaker is rather poorly optimized in its current state of Early Access. Frame rate drops and screen tearing were nearly constant during my many playthroughs, and crashes or disconnections were common, especially if you weren't the moderator. But the worst part is that every time you die you need to respawn minute Loading screens and menus creep by before you get back into the action, making the inevitable failure in a roguelite game that demands failure feel like a harsh punishment. It's encouraging that improvements have been rolled out to mitigate the severity of some of these issues, and I fully expect this to be an area of ​​continued improvement over the coming weeks and months, but for now at least, it's likely to be quite fluid.