I have many things to say about this game, some good, some bad...
Here's the review, undetailed for those who want a quick idea of what this game is :
- Hyper light breaker is a roguelite that looks good, plays okay, and runs really bad. It's a game with many, MANY problems in terms of both gameplay and optimization.
The game has, as it stands, no replay value once you've completed a run, as runs are not that different from one another. You would be better off playing Risk of Rain 2.
Now here's the detailed review :
I have played many roguelites and 3D adventure games and this game is trying to be both of them, which stems from a good idea... But the implementation is terrible.
First of, the choice of your character does not matter in the slightest, aside from a few stat changes. That makes it so characters act more like skins.
There are a lot of roguelites that change the gameplay a lot based on the character you pick and this isn't one of them, which is a strange choice considering characters exist in roguelites to add replay value.
Now the exploration isn't interesting either. They tried many things, like adding point of interest with drops and keys to open boss doors to force the player to explore, except this does not add depth to the exploration as you have very few choices aside from "let's loot everything"
In Star of Providence and Risk of Rain, looting everything means facing more danger, in one of them you don't know what's in a room until you entered it, and in the other you have time-sensitive difficulty scaling that makes you want to go faster and pick the places you want to go quickly.
By removing the risk of the unknown, Star of Providence would be less interesting because you'd already know where to go to beat the run.
By removing the risk of the difficulty scaling by time, Risk of Rain 2 would undoubtedly be very boring.
HLB has no risk and reward options to spice up the game, that means your solution to everything is to just loot every corner of the map. The game lacks an element of momentum which could really make it better.
If they really want to emphasize on the exploration, why even make a roguelite? Hyper Light Drifter was already dynamic enough by just being a zelda-like, if HLB was a multiplayer adventure game similar to Zelda it would've probably been a more fitting game.
The combat is satisfying, with weapons having quite a lot of movesets.
These weapons have passive (inherent) and active (special) abilities that make them more unique, but it's convoluted in such a way that you need to stop and learn what each weapon does to actually harness all of their potential.
This in insight seems like a great idea, but really slows down the pace of the game when you're already in the heat of the action.
The problem with the current passive abilities is that they are way less intuitive than the specials, and the specials having their own button for each weapon make that even more confusing because you'd expect those cool attacks to be on the charge button.
In Dead Cells, weapons only have active abilities that makes you want to play aggressively to activate the crit condition of these weapons. By removing the convoluted way the weapons work in Hyper Light Breaker and making them simpler to learn and hard to master, the game would be way smoother for newcomer, and still interesting for experts.
The music and sound design is very well made, the game looks good and the world feels like it has lived and is falling apart.
Overall, it's a game with good ambience, a cool worldbuilding, but a gameplay design that really should have an overhaul.
I am not asking for this game to be another game totally, it just needs to fix those pacing issues to feel like a smoother experience.
I cannot recommend it in it's current state as it runs badly on top of everything else, I really tried to give a chance and I wanted to see if the updates would change it, but since development has stopped, there is probably no way it gets better.
