Hyper Light Breaker review: "A shaky start for Heart Machine's looter shooter slasher prequel"

Predecessor Hyper Light Drifter garnered a cult classic reputation for its feeling of isolation, environmental storytelling, and tight 2D gameplay full of secrets. Which makes Hyper Light Breaker a big surprise, a 3D prequel that focuses on straight, loot-based, third-person melee action mixing melee and gunplay in the vein of Destiny and Borderlands – right the way down to embracing multiplayer. Whether solo or co-op, however, it isn't winning many fans so far in early access, and it's easy to see why.

A singular loop comprises the entire game at present. You spawn back at the Cursed Outpost, a small hub area where you can unlock nodes on your skill tree, find other players to team up with, and also fix up shops by spending in-game currency to then buy guns, blades, armor, and Holobytes – extra perks that buff stats, or add the likes rot or fire damage to enemies (you can mix and match five). All of these come with the now-standard color scheme of item rarity making it feel very much like any other loot based shooter. You then use a Telepad to travel to The Overgrowth to play the game proper.

The Overgrowth is a randomly-generated map set in the Hyper Light Drifter universe, full of remnants of civilization overgrown and overrun by mobs of monsters. You shoot them with Rails, slash them with different styles of melee weapons, or chuck grenades if you've got some in your loadout. Your task is to collect five guarded artifacts called Prisms to unlock a Crown, which is a boss fight. Beat three bosses and you take on the Abyss King. After that, you need to head to an extraction point to get the hell out of Dodge. Fail at any stage and you lose one of your four lives. Lose all four lives or beat the loop and the game generates a new world… and you start again.

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And this is where the problems begin. All gear and Holobytes have pips – between one and two at present – removed on death. So, if you die twice in one run without looting more gear, you've lost all your gear. The game is incredibly challenging, especially when played solo, so the game is a frequent series of disappointments as you find something you like and lose it all too quickly. A patch on Day 3 added more default health because it was just too easy to die, but even going from 85 to 100 hit points hasn't changed things much. It remains mega punishing.

Even Hyper Light Drifter gives you the ability to refill your health bar with medkits right from the get-go, but here you'll likely play for several hours before you work out how to even acquire and unlock them. The difficulty is compounded by the game not really explaining that the Abyss King is making the world more dangerous as you play, filling up a yellow bar under the minimap, elevating the danger level over time. Linger too long in the Overgrowth and you'll end up facing miniboss after miniboss as they drop from the sky. So just staying alive increases your chance of death. Pretty harsh, especially when you don't understand why.

What the game also doesn't make clear is that you can extract at any time without penalty. The extraction point is always shown on the minimap, which is your biggest clue, but you can head there any time, fight off a few waves of enemies while you wait for it to kick in, and then emerge with refilled health at the Cursed Outpost. When you go back in, the danger meter is reset and you can start again, only with everything still collected.

Developer Heart Machine has thankfully acknowledged it hasn't done enough "onboarding" to get players up to speed, leaving many confused and bewildered. But complaints on Day 1 also mentioned dodgy performance on lower-spec machines, which has already – very impressively – been patched after those first couple of days, leaving the game running much better on an NVIDIA RTX 2070-enabled laptop. It still has chuggy moments, but overall it's much improved. It's also already playable on Steam Deck, but looks noticeably rougher and runs worse, though that's also being worked on. Other problems like mouse sensitivity have been fixed in that first patch, which is great.

Hyper Light Breaker does attempt to reveal its story without using any dialogue, not only through environmental storytelling, but through unlockable, hand-drawn pictures that tell what happened between the Breakers and the Crowns. Whether you'll care enough to unlock it all remains to be seen. There are some moments of haunting beauty, with the wind rippling through grass and light filtering through trees, but it doesn't come close to capturing that aching sense of sadness of the first game.

Right now, Hyper Light Breaker feels like a mash-up of ideas from disparate console generations, very PS2-feeling combat coming up against modern live service sensibilities, with flashes of visual stylings from everything in between. Mobs and environmental features repeat way too quickly, and the loot and perks aren't as interesting as they could be.

The important thing to remember is that this is Early Access, which means the game literally isn't finished, but based on this first week with it, there's a long way to go before Version 1.0. As it stands right now, due to difficulty, complexity, unoriginality and repetition, our advice is to wait and see how further updates fare – at this stage, it's simply not worth getting burned. Fingers crossed that changes soon.

Looking to play something else with friends? Take a look at our best co-op games list for some suggestions!