Review | Hyper Light Breaker - Breath of the Warframe
When I originally retired from reviewing video games in my twenties, choosing the hum-drums of no longer being deluded enough to try and use the street cred I got from independent games and music circles to get laid, Hyper Light Drifter wasn't out - but I still kept track of its development much the same. At the time I was living with my parents, a reclusive 26-year-old who used the new-found privilege of not paying rent to create some free time and dalliances for myself.
Hyper Light Drifter, scored by disasterpiece, should always be phrased in italics, no matter how long that sentence gets. It is a game refute with moments of silence and texture, giant and bombast. The overhead view and pixelart make sure the player is always seeing everything they need to: enemies are rarely off camera and if they are it's as a surprise to the player: what's important is in view with every step. Alx Preston, inspired by their own congenital heart disease put parts of themself in the steps the player takes.
Boss areas redeem the game and ask: why isnt this the total focus?
Hyper Light Breaker, 2025 - or maybe 2026, is an early-access sequel by some of the same developers of the original. Because everything has to be, now, it is an open world, procedurally generated action game boasting a tough-as-nails difficulty and respawning enemies: now, we, the players, are faced with a clock of our own mortality. The world is frozen and over, and yet teeth still rise out of the sand looking to swallow our blood.
This time it's forever. Now, the world comes apart and re-forms itself with an algorithm after every string of defeats, obscuring itself and regurgitating more of the same crumbling columns and strange architectures. When we see a distant vista we check our map, drop a waypoint, and hope we don't have to fight anything along the way. A small green circle ticks down to tell us when to stop using the free-provided transport methods or leaves us plunging into the water to our doom. Here, there's no aplomb when I end up neck deep in the woods or out in the desert: I hold 'R2' and glide effortlessly over the cartoon surface of the world.
I stop to battle, and I stop to fight, and I stop to die. Sometimes the world drops more mobs on me then I can handle with my equipment and reflexes. The world stops, I regenerate at the bus stop at the end of the world - a hole-in-the-wall shopping gallery that exists for me to mindlessly hold the joystick forward through. There's nothing to see here, not for me: just recycled art assets and palettes from Hyper Light Drifter feeling like I wouldn't notice. I'm insulted it's a rogue-lite - the idea of playing this forever fills me with a deep-set horror. The same sword combos, the same guns, the same world broken up into incremental upgrades and played for the sake of it: doesn't this look neat?
In moments if quiet, the game reminds us that it's meant to be shared in clips on social media.
So often I die over and over and am met with the frozen hospital screen telling me it's time to revive. It seems to be the smallest touch of someone human working on this game left over in a hodgepodge sea of other videogames, a traced influence that never manages to summit the mountains of its own inspirations even once over the first ten hours I spent with the game.
Everything here feels taken from somewhere else. Listless development filling in an ocean of independent titles that have released in the decade since the original released, all following up or being inspired on it in ways that made talented artists go "I wish I could do that". It feels sometimes when we come home to these places, like I have to watch the artist look at the original themselves and say the same thing.
What's the point? Well - it might be the combat. In five or ten more cycles, what the game calls the necessary frames of time advanced by the player, it might be worth something. Hyper Light Breaker doesn't have the sense of *momentum* that a free-to-play MMORPG named Warframe does, in a strict comparison we're still mostly given as players, abilities that would function exactly the same in a 2D space as they do in the arid wastelands of the nobodies-desert that this came is tied together with.
Hyper Loot Drifter.
I spent in my time with the game more time looking at a collection of "!" icons while I focused on the enemy in front of me, the tightly designed encounters of the original a random and randomly generated spread of enemies that can appear at any time. I get little time to look at what I'm fighting while the camera swings around me on a swivel trying to keep track of it all. This isn't something that character action games with either fixed or zoomed out cameras have a problem with - and there's still the sense that the game might serve better with a single fixed viewpoint anyway, the crushing and empty vistas usually provoking an 'i have seen this before' groan rather then excitement.
A suture of bullet-riddled combat mostly taken from other games, but the abilities and poise borrowed offers nothing for the player to wrap their teeth around, it is that same old staid combo of slash-slash-parry, once novel freedoms of movement like a frame instant dash that leaves a cloud of smoke are there to only cover ground in the massive battles the game throws at you, five foot bursts at a time. There's nothing to see here, now - with so much more of the world to look at.
