That headline is probably going to elicit furious typing from those who equate self-worth with the ability to surmount challenging video games, but I’m hoping to explain that the current early access version of Hyper Light Breaker, the co-op roguelike from developer Heart Machine that acts as a prequel to its excellent single-player RPG Hyper Light Drifter, is tuned way too harshly right now.
Heart Machine kindly granted MOP a key to check out this game’s early access, and over a few frustrating hours of play, I found it just felt far too unfair, especially since I wasn’t really able to play with anyone else. But that said, the studio has been making updates over the course of my time, so there’s a little asterisk that I feel is important to talk about – and why I feel this first impression is perfect for Progress Bar.
First, let’s get to the game experience itself: Breaker is set in the similar neon cyber-ish world that Drifter is, only you’re starting off in a hub city trying to stop some catastrophic event in four runs. Every time you begin, the game’s world is procedurally generated, meaning terrain, enemy locations, and treasure locations are all random, and if you die four times, then you have to reprocess the world and start from a new seed. Pretty standard roguelike stuff.
Breaker’s combat also appears to be pretty similar to Drifter’s in that you’ve got to measure your attacks and dodges since you’re in a small bit of animation lock. There’s also a parry move that you can perform that allows you to open up foes to counter-attack. Again, fairly standard.
Here’s where things went wrong for me: The number of enemies in the times I went to play the game by myself were incredibly overwhelming, and the game’s pastel pastiche were not doing me too many favors in terms of isolating targets. The UI in combat was pretty reasonable to read, but I basically felt like I was being shot in the face with a shotgun loaded with paint hues that came directly from ’90s toys.
The color clutter wasn’t the only problem I was facing, as those combat motions felt a bit too manic or tuned way too tightly. Often I would be waylaid by enemies attacking at multiple ranges, and the parry window for any attack felt intensely small. That means I was pretty much relegated to using dash-dodging to avoid damage, but that just ended up making fights extremely unfun for me. Spamming dodge to turn into a laser streak isn’t what I particularly call interesting counterplay.
Also, the enemy health pools always felt really unreasonable. Sometimes enemies would be made of paper; other times they felt like they were made of stone. And in some cases, getting damaged would stun lock me, leaving me open to constant punishment. Even being able to extract from a map with anything I had was stressful, as I was forced to survive waves of multiple enemies before I was allowed to leave. Purely because to hell with me, I guess. Or maybe it’s because the industry is believing a widely spread fiction that extraction games are the hotness right now.
To top off all of the frustration, any item that’s in your inventory, whether it’s a weapon or armor or ability item, has a durability pip that gets removed with every death. And yes, that goes for items that are purchased from shops at the hub. And you’re forced to sit there and watch those pips tick and those items disappear every death. You cannot skip this failure counter. You are left to watch and wallow as gear disintegrates in your hands, your attempts at the run tick down, and that stupid-looking resurrection image appears on-screen again.
But hey, maybe that’s where the co-op play comes in, right? I wish I could tell you how that works, but I can’t because there is no matchmaking in this game, and my husband took one look at my travails and immediately decided to never touch the game again.
So what about progression? Well, that sort of is here. The resources you gather appear to persist regardless of number of deaths, and even when you have to regenerate a seed, the mediocre progress that I did make seemed to fill a bar that granted me extra gubbins that can be spent to reopen shops, progress through a trait tree, and buy gear once those shops were established.
At least I think so? It wasn’t immediately clear what was happening here since the UI was more style than substance and the tutorial basically told me how buttons work and didn’t grant any context on what the hell I was looking at. Yes, Heart Machine, we’re very proud of your cubist visual presentation. Now please tell me what the shit it means!
But that progression felt so incremental and prohibitively expensive that I was losing my will to try. For example: health regeneration items. I didn’t get any when I first started the game, to unlock the ability to hold even just one required a bunch of a rare material to unlock, and even if I had one, refilling them at a shrine required me to find four pieces of a similarly rare material. The whole system was just a big hearty middle finger shoved in my face with fireworks going off and the 1812 Overture playing in the background.
Now with all of these complaints, I need to circle immediately back to the early access nature of this game and the important fact that Heart Machine is hearing complaints and trying to respond. The game’s most recent patch (at the time of this article’s writing) has reworked medkits a bit, letting players start with at least one healing item and the need for more common mats to refill it at shrines. It still feels kind of stingy, though.
I still have to commend Heart Machine for at least recognizing that things are pretty bad right now in terms of its balance and tuning, but I’m not really sure how much the devs will be willing to bend. It’s still very early to tell right now, and this is hardly a final review of what is clearly an early stage of the game. Also I will openly admit that this style of title isn’t really my bag, but maybe it’s more to the taste of others. Presumably others who like the taste of their own blood in their mouths during leisure time.
So I will say that this one needs more time to bake, which is part and parcel for most games entering early access, but I will also say that those who really do find this kind of challenge endearing might end up liking what’s on offer. Or maybe that’s the kind of player this thing is meant to draw in. As of right now, I’m going to say that things aren’t really gelling at the moment and that the studio should be given the time and the grace to make improvements. Perhaps later I’ll come back, but for now, I’ll make space on my drive to try something else.
Early access MMOs are a minefield of underdeveloped releases and almost immediate buyer’s remorse. That’s where Massively OP’s Progress Bar comes in: It’s Chris Neal’s monthly look at developing online multiplayer early access games – and whether they’re worth your money and attention.
