Hyper Light Breaker’s Early Access Launch Has a Decent Foundation, But A Long Way To Go

By Elijah Gonzalez | January 16, 2025 | 1:00pm

Video Games Features Hyper Light Breaker

Hyper Light Breaker’s Early Access Launch Has a Decent Foundation, But A Long Way To Go

Coming off the otherwordly Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash’s speedy platforming, the initial details around Heart Machine’s newest project, Hyper Light Breaker, came as a surprise to many. While their latest is set in the same universe as their previous two games and shares a similar color palette, instead of being another hand-tailored single player experience, it’s a roguelike designed around online co-op. Considering the growing number of roguelikes and multiplayer games trying to be the next big thing, there was understandable skepticism about the studio pivoting from its bread-and-butter to an already oversaturated space. After playing the first few hours of the game’s Early Access release, it’s clear that these concerns were somewhat well-founded because while this initial version has some promising ideas and sharp central combat, it’s held back by difficulty spikes, uneven roguelike elements, and frustrating encounter design.

Before we get into all that, though, let’s explain the core pitch. As specified on its Steam page, Hyper Light Breaker is an “open-world rogue-lite,” and this emphasis on exploration is what sets it apart from most other games in this style. During each run, you have four lives to defeat three bosses spread out across a procedurally generated island that changes each time you reset. If you beat all of them, you unlock your final foe, the Abyss King. However, the catch is that to challenge these bosses, you first have to collect prisms spread throughout the world. There are eight total, and it’s usually not as easy as just walking up and grabbing them; they’ll either be held by powerful enemies or locked away in a hiding place that needs a key. Each boss requires a certain number of prisms to challenge: two for the first, four for the second, and six for the third. I would give an overview of each of these foes, but after a few hours, I’ve only managed to beat the first of these archvillains, a snarling wolfman with a giant sword who looks straight out of Dark Souls. And this resemblance is fitting because these foes will grind you into dust.

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To stand a chance, you’ll need to build up your arsenal, unlocking melee weapons, guns, modifiers called Holobytes, and special attacks called Amps. The tricky part is that when you inevitably die, which will happen a lot, the penalty is that your precious loot takes damage. If an item accumulates enough damage, it will break forever and become unusable. While you can store your equipment in the Hub World and retreat to your home base mid-run by reaching an extraction point, you will inevitably die and lose your favorite weapon. If that sounds like a dealbreaker for you, then it probably is. Put simply, Hyper Light Breaker is a medley of game genres that delight in kicking players in the teeth as it combines elements of extraction shooters, survival games, roguelikes, and FromSoftware’s output.

On the bright side, you’re at least sort of given the tools to meet these challenges because the controls already feel crisp and snappy. The dodge comes out fast, has lots of invincibility, travels far, and, as a bonus, looks quite cool with its glowing after-image. On top of this, there’s a rewarding parry move that you’ll have to rely on because certain attacks can’t be dodged and parrying is one of the few ways to restore health. And that’s not to mention the most gratifying move at your disposal, Flash Step, which lets you dart across the battlefield in an iridescent blur, closing the gap in an instant. While the gunplay generally felt underwhelming due to a lack of firepower and general scarcity of ammo, overall, this experience at least partially justifies its tough-as-nails difficulty with a twitchy toolset that gives you a fighting chance.

However, when it comes to these battles, there’s one massive problem that proves a near-constant source of frustration: they almost always throw way too many foes at you at once. Unlike the goons in the Arkham games who politely line up one at a time to get decked by the Caped Crusader, the fiends here are more than happy to jump you in a group. I can’t count the number of times I got blown up by a random rocket that flew in from across the map or got hit in the back of the head by some schmuck because my attention was focused on a deadlier opponent.

These situations are particularly irritating because much of the game seems tailored around one-on-one duels, whether that’s how the basic melee attack only targets a single unit at a time or how these gaggles of monsters square awkwardly with the general focus on parrying. During boss fights, a constant spawn of lesser minions kept me distracted from the giant enemy eager to end my life the second I diverted my attention, a situation exacerbated by the wonky camera lock-on, which loves to disengage if your target zooms past you. All in all, healing items are scarce, death comes with massive punishment, your adversaries hit hard, and there are usually a lot of them; it’s brutal and frankly veers towards feeling downright unfair.

If there’s a silver lining (for some), these battles usually feel much better when paired with teammates because it makes it easier to divide and conquer. Unfortunately, while this seems like the intended way to play, I ran into several problems with co-op. First off, there’s a lack of communication tools, like simple emotes, making it tricky to coordinate. Worst yet, if you die while playing co-op, you have to sit around while you wait for a revive that may never come because it relies on specific items your teammates may not have. And weirdly enough, while hunting in a pack in the open world helped mitigate the overwhelming odds, the bosses seemed more difficult when teamed up because these encounters scaled to the number of combatants. When I finally beat the first major boss, the previously described wolfman, it came right after a disastrous team attempt went sideways. Granted, this could have been because my allies had weak weapons or any other number of reasons, but this mismatch is odd.

And these problems with difficulty are exacerbated by how hard you’re punished for failure. As previously mentioned, your loot takes damage when you die, meaning you’ll likely churn through weapons more quickly than you’d like. What makes this particularly painful is that when you combine the game’s open world exploration with its extraction mechanic that lets you reset the in-game difficulty timer that makes runs harder as they go on, attempts can go on for hours only to be undone in literal seconds when you challenge one of the uber-difficult bosses. While most action rogue-lites/roguelikes funnel you toward your end goal at a rapid pace, the open-ended nature of this one makes it easy to drag things out before getting instantly demolished. There’s a weird tension where you have to grind to ensure you have good gear, but then you can lose the fruits of your labor right away if you rematch a boss a few times in a row, which, again, you have to do to win. Basically, these pieces simply don’t line up at the moment.

With Hyper Light Breaker, you can see the core foundation of something quite exciting. The central combat is flashy and fast, with a gratifying dodge and an even better parry. Visually, these procedurally generated open worlds are an alluring mixture of otherworldly neon and strange alien sights, as purple cliffsides give way to orange skies. It has all the style you would expect from Heart Machine and their previous work, with a synthy soundtrack that transports you to a strange world. Beyond this, the idea of an open-ended roguelike is quite unique, and the way it threads the needle between games like Breath of the Wild (there’s a glider, stamina wheel, etc.) and Risk of Rain 2 (the roguelike structure and increased difficulty over time) has potential thanks to the cohesive feel of the procedurally generated maps.

However, while there’s the framework for something compelling here, the rampant difficulty spikes, brutal punishment for failure, and the hefty length of runs quickly soured me on this experience. While all of this criticism comes with the massive caveat that the game only just entered Early Access and will certainly see many tweaks between now and its full release, it’s difficult to recommend this one in its current form. Hyper Light Breaker has some interesting ideas, but it’s just not there yet.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11 and on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.