Sometimes Early Access can feel like a way for games to get away with being unfinished or simply broken. Yes, it's great being able to experience a title and help inform the developers and sculpt it so that the eventual "complete" version is better than ever, but at the same time this often comes with the expectation that the Early Access edition leaves a lot to be desired. For developer Heart Machine and its latest project Hyper Light Breaker, this isn't quite the case, but it's also not a game that I'd recommend to the masses in its current state, mostly due to a slate of design philosophy and scaling that as of the moment feels vastly out of proportion.
Before I get into my thinking, let me first explain what I really like about Hyper Light Breaker so far. At the top is, as expected, the art direction. This game is frankly gorgeous and the creative team who love and excel in vibrant art styles have knocked it out of the park once again. Everywhere you go in the open maps, each enemy you face, all the projectiles being hurled at you and even the projectiles and weapon slashes you send back, it's all stunning and really eye-catching. Also, following up to this, Heart Machine has put a great emphasis on variety already, with tons of excellent and unique enemies that will challenge you and make your life a living hell, as well as providing many buildcrafting avenues to make your character stand out.
There are a bunch of bosses to take on if you have the skills to reach them, there are various characters to play as if you manage to unlock them, the roguelike system actually works really well and is quite easy to understand, and the Overgrowth (the playable world) is generally quite interesting to explore for the tens of minutes you usually spend in it before either extracting or dying. The point I'm trying to make here is that there's a good foundation at the heart of Hyper Light Breaker, something that Heart Machine can lean on while continuing to refine and improve the places that really need some more love and attention. And yes, there are quite a few of them.
The elephant in the room is simply the difficulty. This game is frustratingly hard and merciless at the same time. There are basically no informative and useful tutorial systems that explain how the game functions, meaning you get launched into a world where everything is trying to kill you and where the odds are always stacked against you. The enemies hit harder than you, there are more of them than you feel comfortable taking on, the loot is underwhelming and never improves or buys into the power fantasy that you need to beat the harsh odds, and it's currently incredibly hard to regain health, more so considering you do not start with any health packs, med kits, or healing solutions, and cannot easily acquire them either. This all comes together to make for an experience where it is incredibly challenging to make any significant headway as you have to ask the question as to whether it's worth losing 30 health points for the chance of earning a marginally better weapon that you could lose after a couple of deaths.
The power curve in Hyper Light Breaker is horribly unbalanced right now and it means that the combat doesn't feel rewarding or fun, as there is simply too much at stake at every single waking moment. It's a shame that this is the case because the combat mechanics actually work really well and show great potential, but I cannot see many players as of the moment sticking with the game and attempting to beat the first of its three major, true bosses.
Also, while the Overgrowth is visually striking and has some compelling ideas, this map is also frankly a nightmare to explore. Hyper Light Breaker wants you to leap, climb, glide, and surf over the map on your hoverboard, similar to former Heart Machine movement styles. However, in practice this doesn't really work as your character feels too slow, too small, and too inept at moving through the world, so much so that you'll be stumped by cliff faces and valleys and bodies of water that you will drown in if you fall into their depths. This is a map with promising ideas and a compelling structure but which simply does not want you to explore it.
My last major frustration with the game is its overuse of currencies. There are so many different things to gather and collect and spend and use for upgrading, and none of it is explained in any meaningful depth. While I do understand how to spend many of them after hours of trial and error, the variety still makes me loathe their inclusion. For example, you use Bright Blood as the main transactional currency, but then Material too for buying weapons, Medigems for acquiring health packs, Keys for opening locked doors, Gold Rations for major and permanent character development, Cores for temporary character development, and Abyss Stones for the late game upgrades. Why there needs to be so many currencies eludes me, especially since a run typically takes around an hour at the moment, and because there are only four vendors to actually spend these resources at currently...
I won't point fingers at the lack of vendors or the more limited overall content right now because Heart Machine can methodically add that as the Early Access period progresses. But what it needs to prioritise right now are serious changes to the gameplay, difficulty, movement, as just a few key examples. I do have faith that Hyper Light Breaker can become quite an engaging and interesting game, but as it stands, it's simply not a lot of fun to play, and for me, if a video game isn't enjoyable it isn't really achieving its most basic task all that well.