Normally, when a sequel is announced that’s a wild departure from the original, I welcome it with open arms – look no further than my inexplicable but everlasting love of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts as evidence. But after more than a dozen hours with Hyper Light Breaker – a follow-up (though not a proper sequel) to one of my all-time favorite indie games, Hyper Light Drifter – I feel like Vito Corleone telling y’all to look at how they massacred my boy. There’s clearly the skeleton of a good action-RPG hidden somewhere in this incredibly challenging co-op roguelite, but it’s currently buried deeper than the sun can see under sloppy combat mechanics, shallow and frustrating exploration, and scant content that feels repetitive after just a couple hours. Of course, this is its early access launch, so there’s always hope an initially rough package will transform into something much better with enough time, but what’s here right now is largely a disappointment.
The goal of each run is to hunt around a randomized map for better gear and key items before taking on three highly deadly and supremely irritating bosses, then extract yourself back to base to regroup, buy some upgrades, and do it again. The procedurally generated worlds you and up to two friends will spend most of your time exploring at least look quite pretty, using a unique art style that channels the vibe of Hyper Light Drifter in 3D quite well. But these repetitive areas are extremely obnoxious to navigate, filled with awkward cliffs and crooked landscapes that feel like I’m not actually supposed to be climbing them but offer me no other choice. On the bright side, they at least give you a neat hoverboard to ride around on and do tricks, and although the controls are as sloppy as everything else, hoverboards are indeed still dope as hell and there are definitely some good times to be had there.
Sadly, the same can’t be said about the lackluster hack-and-slash combat. There isn’t anything interesting about the melee attacks you are given, the alternative third-person shooting option has very limited ammo, moving and dodging feel unresponsive and inconsistent, and the lock-on system constantly toggled itself off unexpectedly and got me and my crew killed many times – to the point where I just stopped using it altogether. Combine that with the fact that you’re constantly swarmed by mobs that are often more annoyingly omnipresent than interesting, and a Hyper Light Breaker can get quite infuriating. And you better hope you’ve got some friends willing to help you with your runs, because things feel even worse when you’re playing alone as there is seemingly no scaling of any kind to compensate for your reduced manpower.
These things are especially frustrating when Hyper Light Breaker has been balanced to be so immediately difficult – and I mean exceedingly difficult, and that’s coming from someone with all the achievements in Sekiro – but doesn’t bother to explain its rules and often punishes you with an onslaught of enemy attacks that feel cheap. It’s also quite funny that you start with no healing items whatsoever (and are only given them at great expense and extremely sparingly) when you’d think you would need them most at the beginning when you’re learning. Instead, you basically have to throw yourself at impossible odds until you can unlock the bare minimum you need to survive.
There are only two of a planned three bosses to be found in the current version of Hyper Light Breaker: a giant wolf with a sword named Dro, and a melee warrior who wields fiery magic named Exus. Both are incredibly sloppy fights where minions are summoned endlessly and the boss flops around erratically to do massive damage. Dealing with these beefy leaders on their own is straightforward enough, but when you’re constantly bombarded by the same highly lethal enemies you find in the open-world areas, already challenging encounters become downright annoying. It also means you’re almost required to fight them alongside a full crew of three players if you want to win, with at least one person just focusing on crowd control. If your teammates falter in the middle of the fight, you’ll quickly find yourself in a nearly hopeless situation and get swarmed to death. And to add insult to injury, you have to beat the more irritating of the two fights, Dro, twice to complete a run right now in lieu of the third unique boss that hasn’t been added yet. And even when you manage to do so, you’re told that the final boss, the Abyss King, isn’t available yet before your run ends and you get sent back to start a new one.
Unfortunately, Hyper Light Breaker doesn’t currently give you a lot of reasons to continue playing after that. Sure, you’ll unlock small perks that grow you a bit stronger and make runs more manageable, but there’s very little new to see or do once you head back out. Simply having an easier go of it in later runs feels quite backwards to the roguelite formula as well, one that usually has you turning on difficulty modifiers and whatnot so the challenge level keeps up with you in exchange for greater reward. None of that can be found in Hyper Light Breaker at present. Even the two alternate characters you can unlock only have a few stat changes and one unique perk to differentiate them – although playing as a surfing ninja raccoon is at least pretty dope aesthetically.
The lack of any unique or powerful loot also contributed to my waning interest, especially once I completed a run or two. You’ll find a few different types of melee and ranged weapons, from cumbersome greatswords and lightning-fast hand claws, to peashooter sidearms and powerful shotguns, but the common and very weak versions of these items feel incredibly similar to the rare and powerful versions you’ll unlock down the road, merely adding some additional damage over time, little perks like restoring health when you execute an enemy, or some other minor benefit. Completely missing from the pool of items are any crazy game-changing options that substantially increase your effectiveness in combat or alter how you approach a given run.
Finally, and least surprisingly, Hyper Light Breaker is pretty poorly optimized in its current early access state. Frame rate dips and screen tearing were nearly constant during many of my play sessions and crashes or disconnects are a regular occurrence, especially if you aren’t the host. But worst of all, respawning after each death takes minutes of loading screens and menus slowly crawling by before you can get back into the action, making the inevitable failed runs in a roguelite that demands failure feel like a severe punishment. It’s encouraging that improvements have already been rolled out to make some of these issues less severe, and I fully expect this will be an area of continued improvement in the coming weeks and months, but at least right now, it can be quite rocky.