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Hyper Light Breaker’s 3D reworking of Drifter’s combat is promising but a little rawA dimension too far?
A dimension too far?
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
The aforesaid hoverboard and glider, together with the streaking neon visual direction, suggest a game of fluid acrobatics, akin to the studio’s last releaseSolar Ash, which, to quote Ed’sreview, “has you rollerblade around shattered worlds like a post apocalyptic gazelle on wheels”. Perhaps that game exists deeper within Hyper Light Breaker, but during my 20 minutes with the game at GDC, I found myself stopping and starting and struggling to build momentum using a combat system that felt both deliberately challenging and stilted.
Hyper Light Breaker at Day of the Devs 2024 @ GDCWatch on YouTube
Hyper Light Breaker at Day of the Devs 2024 @ GDC
A quick rundown of the basics: you’ve got regular attacks, “flash step” attacks that launch you towards a target (perhaps to keep a combo going, say), chargeable finishers, parries, dashes that confer some invincibility, and ranged attacks that switch you to an over-the-shoulder perspective. The opposition in my demo consisted of green slimes that posed minimal threat, gangs of more intimidating gremlin skirmishers, combined-arms forces including shooters who fled on approach, and ogre bosses who can happily pancake you in a couple of hits.
Enemies have pronounced tells for easier parrying - a clownish overarm wind-up, or a beam of red light from a gun, with accompanying audio effects distinct enough to register while playing the game on a noisy conference floor. Despite this, I was repeatedly caught out. The gremlins in particular have moves that appear to home a little, and that travel a long distance through intervening enemies and cosmetic fixtures.
Hyper Light Drifterhad similar means of making you suffer, but it also had a top-down perspective, and cleaner arena or room-based battles. Breaker spills all that out across a mixture of procedural and hand-crafted 3D geography with vegetation and changes of elevation, and the result is greater potential for being ambushed simply because an enemy’s haymaker happened to start a little out of eyeshot. I also had a hard time dodging projectiles, with shots occasionally seeming to connect even though I’d ducked out of the way.
Image credit:Gearbox Publishing
In general, I found my character to be unwieldy and a little unresponsive. Equipped with dual knives and a pistol, they’re one of several classes you’ll be able to choose from in Breaker’s final form, so perhaps I simply drew the short straw this time round. However, while the conspicuous recovery times of your attack and damage animations nudges you to memorise the inputs and avoid over-committing, Breaker’s delays feel a little too drawn-out versus the overall floridity and fluidity of its presentation. In particular, the presence of gliders and hoverboards make you want to torpedo through the world as you did in Solar Ash. You also have to work around the shift between a looser third-person melee camera and an over-the-shoulder perspective for shooting - which, once more with feeling, you didn’t have to bother with in Drifter, punishing as it could be.
Still, Hyper Light Breaker seems to have a lot of rough bits that justify it releasing into early access. Rather than a gazelle on wheels, as in Solar Ash, I felt like a gazelle with its shoelaces tied. Won’t people please stop accessorising the gazelles?
