Hyper Light Breaker

Officially confirmed that no more updates will be given to the game even though it's still in early access. Please do not support.

I so badly wanted this game to succeed. The world of Hyper Light Drifter. The feeling and wonder. The speed and control. All of that in a 3D space. With friends, no less! And then it was none of those things. Instead it's slow, it's poorly optimized despite looking like a Switch game and it has none of the beautiful melancholy Drifter did. It's not a Hyper Light title.

Don’t bother, while this game did have a lot of potential it has unfortunately went out the window as Heart Machine just laid off the entire dev team for the game and now the game is now stuck in Early Access purgatory and probably won’t see completion anytime soon

With Arc Games on a game like this, or even in general, it was doomed from go. Don't blame the devs, blame the publishers, they definitely took the gold and left Heart Machine holding the bag.

TLDR company laid off entire dev team and game is stuck in EA purgatory. DO NOT BUY. Sadly the game is not ever going to be out of EA, the company is laying off the devs and has stated they are done with any type of updates for game. The game was good, had potential and it has completely fallen and will never make it to even a full release which is very sad and unfortunate. Do not buy.

If you thought about playing this game because you like Hyper Light Drifter; I understand your feeling of excitement. I had not played other Heart Machine games other than HLD, so I pretty much expected a top notch game--I was very encouraged by the ambitions of this sequel. Hyper Light Breaker was marketed as a sequel to HLD pulling from the lore and universe of their critically acclaimed top down action adventure game, akin to top down Legend of Zelda games with satisfying combat & movement, environmental storytelling, and a truly one of a kind OST. With a twist, they opted to create a rogue-like with generative open worlds to explore. Seemed like a great marriage of themes and ideas--albeit ambitious for a small studio. Considering their natural progression in their track record, I was fairly confident in this release When early access hit, I was very excited to get rolling in a new world each run. I played about 45 minutes, and could not get gripped in the sorry state the game was in. This experience has cemented my opinion in Early Access games, why is my enjoyment now suddenly a developers labor to extract value from? And as a gamer, why am I paying to playtest an unfinished product? In my view this was released in a way too-early-access of a state to warrant my purchase. My friends and I both were of the opinion once the "closer to final version" was published that we would revisit. Now, sometime after the release of the road map, I would have to assume that the publisher has decided to scrap the game due to poor sales, and reception in early access. I can also imagine, that competitors in this space like Elden Ring Night Reign, Windblown, or staples like Risk of Rain 2 saturating the market did not set the developers up for success--that space in the market was strained in saturation impacting the reception upon early access release. This experience from a consumer perspective has been a huge disappointment. It has made me skeptical in the actual trustworthiness of Arc Games as a publisher, and Heart Machine as a developer. Maybe 'cause I couldn't see the numbers contributing to the runway, this business decision, or decisions that led to this outcome, is one of the worst fumbles of a publisher / developer combination I have had the displeasure of experiencing first hand. For any professional in the games industry, this should be viewed as a case study of what not to do to your fanbase. Unless this game can resume development, I do not believe this game would ever be worth your hard earned dollar--from a consumer market perspective, there are countless other multiplayer rogue-likes that will achieve a much better experience: a complete game state, and likely less money. Only Heart Machine game I can recommend that I've played at this point is still the magical Hyper Light Drifter. To the devs: you clearly put your best foot forward into the game. My only critique at this point is identify this publisher profile; and stay as far away as you can. The result would indicate that you've had a string of bad luck with publishers on this game, and I wish you luck on your next endeavor.

HLD will always be one of my favorite games of all time so it feels pretty bad that the first time that I've ever been truly burned on Early Access was by Heart Machine. I can appreciate the big swing of going for an open world roguelike, but maybe in retrospect just making Ocarina of Hyper Light would have been a better idea when you had already somehow done A Link to the Past. 1 hour played and no shot at a refund now, feel pretty justified in asking for a discount code for HLB believers for Possessors or something

Update (9th Oct '25): ♥♥♥♥ these pieces of ♥♥♥♥, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME, the devs have been fired and the development has been stopped on this game. It wont be leaving Early Access anymore. I bought this game as a means of supporting the developers due to their success with hyper light drifter but I severely regret this decision and wish I could get a refund. The developers are not on the same page as the players and their recommendations; There's little to no focus on optimisation or variety in terms of enemies and things to do, which eventually leads the game to feel monotonous. Like others have mentioned, they seem to have been corporate-ized, in the sense that this seems to be made to follow the recent trend of "roguelikes"; not to make a soul-filled game for their loyal customers, but another cow to milk for their dear shareholders. I may change this review if the game changes overall but I highly doubt it. The discord is heavily moderated and censored and has a lot of confirmatory-bias.

I can't really tell what their goal is for this game but it seems like it's mostly sucked the soul out of what Hyper Light Drifter was (it is very clearly not trying to be Hyper Light Drifter and that's okay, but it feels heavily corporatized, especially watching their twitch developer streams). The game is full of stat stick upgrades that do not feel exciting and are forgettable, I could not name a single upgrade if I tried. The combat is a pretty boring one button beat-em-up. They need to make huge changes in its current state that I'm very doubtful will be made for this game to even be considered middle of the road on full release. It's a really sad seeing an incredible IP hang so low.