Cooperative games are one of the areas where there can never be enough games. No, really – when Steam sales come, most of my friend circle is left to guess what to pick up next to play together. We’ve tried quite a few games with a decent amount of content, like Stardew Valley, Terraria, Palworld, and many more. In today’s world, it is more difficult than ever to play something with your brain in auto-pilot mode. One game I found that is quite relaxing and still manages to hit the spot is Deep Rock Galactic, where you can shut off your brain, kill some insects, and mine some rocks. Needless to say, I was quite glad when I saw Hyper Light Breaker—an open-world hack-and-slash game with a roguelike twist on it—with coop. So I took it out for a spin.
When I first dived into the game, I remember feeling extremely numb. Is there a lot of weird NSFW stuff—a lot of gore, uncanny violence, weird sex scenes happening on the screen that puts me off? Well, yes, and no. The game was trying to teach me some of the basics, but the tutorials weren’t really up to the mark. After I came to the main loading area of the game—a sort of marketplace where you can buy equipment or upgrades or interact with the vendors—I was confused as to what to do to get started with the game.
There’s little to no guidance as to what these vendors actually sell, how you can equip the same, and how to determine what gear is better than the other (or suits a certain playstyle). I’m not exactly sure why the developers thought it would be good to do away without explaining the mechanics in an age where attention spans are fickler than a politician’s promises. Other coop games like Deep Rock Galactic also do the same thing – they drop you in a space lounge and then allow the players to discover – with the exception being that the mechanics don’t need much discovery to begin with (most of it is already pretty well explained in the tutorial).
The game itself chooses to play like a roguelike. You can pick up upgrades, perks, weapons, and currency in the world while exploring and killing monsters. You can return to the base to upgrade to better stuff or change up your existing stuff to suit a new playstyle. The player character has access to both ranged and melee weapons, with better weapons being available as the player progresses through the run (or in later runs). Except… you’re probably going to be doing a lot of figuring out how many of these mechanics work in the first place. It is only when you discover that going back to base is a thing during one run—only then will things start moving for you within the game.
Hyper Light Breaker is a coop hack and slash roguelike that players can enjoy alone or with up to 2 friends. You hack and slash your way through enemies in the world till you overcome all of the bosses—till you cross over to the new world/level. After encountering a number of worlds/levels, you come across a boss stage where you’ll need everything in your inventory to hit back hard. The game takes place in an open world with multiple points of interest on the map. Each point of interest has a weapon or perk, that can be gained by killing all of the enemies in the area and looting the main containers.
If you’re thinking, “Is that it?” well, yeah. The game doesn’t really have content beyond that. You can grind up to better weapons even after a run is over, but there really isn’t anything else beyond that. One of the games that did this properly was probably Hades; the roguelike elements had stories added inside them, forcing the player to ‘git gud’ if they wanted a portion of the story. In Hyper Light Breaker, there’s no “score” on a giant scoreboard or a story to look forward to. The only hype is launching the game, calling your buddies, and going for another run until you get bored and get back to Stardew Valley, Deep Rock Galactic, or Terraria. There’s a shocking lack of content for a roguelike, and honestly, everything in the game screams, “Get off the PC and go touch grass!”
Hyper Light Breaker’s world design looks very monotonous from a three-dimensional perspective. I have not played Hyper Light Drifter, their previous game, but most of my peers have been appreciative of it. Applying the aesthetics that made a two-dimensional game like Hyper Light Drifter popular didn’t exactly translate very well, to say the least. Most of the levels (or worlds) look exactly the same—draped in a giant pink filter. The sheer amount of bright pink did make me rethink my decision to play the game multiple times, but the lure of a hack-and-slash roguelike (and the numbers on mobs dropping to zero) forced me to go on.
Hyper Light Breaker employs a unique way of designing the world that makes it stand out from the rest of the crowd in the indie market. The only problem with this design philosophy would be that errors seem much more glaring when seen. The same looking environments in different worlds—a giant stretch of pink—do little to keep people until they find the next set of wandering enemies to slaughter for ‘fun’. Even the base (or the rest area where the vendors are present) looks very ugly and something straight out of a nightmare.
The use of typography that is very difficult to decipher further accentuates the feeling of hopelessness, making it very difficult to keep at it for multiple runs (or to suggest the game to other players). Imagine you’re Robinson Crusoe, marooned on an island with water all around – except the sea is pink and so bright it blinds your eyes. You have a big dad bod from the beer cans you drank to stave off the melancholy instilled by the hopelessness of failing to decipher a video game’s mechanics.
There are frequent performance issues, starting from the loading area and continuing well into the main game. Micro-stutters totally ruin the fun of moving a sword and making the numbers above a boss’s head go down. Sometimes, they distract you to the point your dodging skills from playing Soulslike games vanish into thin air. The world doesn’t look very texture-heavy, so I’m unsure what was the cause of the stuttering.
Hyper Light Breaker is an early access title that brings a coop hack and slash game to the masses and completely misses the mark. The game needs a major revamp for its mechanics as well as in its design before it becomes a contender for “third best coop game for the basement dwellers.” I would definitely hold back on a buy until major updates come in, or just jump ship to another coop game in case they don’t.