Hyper Light Breaker hoverboard sim. Technically, it’s a third-person roguelite adventure set in a glossy fantasy-cyberpunk universe, but after playing the 30-minute preview, it’s clear to me that Hyper Light Breaker it’s all about the hoverboard. Wild beasts, hidden holes and shiny weapons are secondary to the joy I find in gliding over green hills and shallow waters on my bright blue board and narrowly dodging enemy encounters.
Skipping fights on purpose was probably the opposite of what lead animator Chris Bullock wanted me to do during my first public hands-on opportunity. Hyper Light Breaker – but if that was the case, he shouldn’t have told me about the hoverboard.
Hyper Light Breaker is set to go live in early access On Steam this summer, it’s complete with three-player online co-op. Heart Machine’s developers are letting people play it for the first time this week at Day of Devs: San Francisco Edition, held in conjunction with GDC. I played a remote preview of the game at home, solo style, while Bullock watched on Discord (and was probably very pissed off).
Fighter is an open-world game with a hub station called Cursed Outpost, a futuristic strip mall with shops, upgrade stations, and NPCs. I explored the outpost briefly, but the bulk of the game takes place in Overgrowth, a landscape of ever-changing biomes, and I focused on diving into those. The biomes in Overgrowth are constructed with hand-crafted and procedurally generated elements so that players will never enter the same realm twice, and each has a boss to defeat called the Crown. Despite my desire to fly peacefully through the half-hour demo, I messed around with two payloads, took out a few slime hordes, and twice tried to kill one of those Crowns – a giant bipedal monster warrior with a golden sword named Dro.
In both of my fights with Dro, he attacked immediately and with incredible force, swinging the blade wildly as he leaped in a huge arc over the temple and directly over my head. I ran and tried to charge up his stagger meter with basic attacks with my sword and firearm, but the monster was relentless, especially compared to the basic enemies I easily dispatched around the biome.
Dro beat me twice. At the end of each battle, I heard the game’s siren song draw me in, convincing me that if I applied a renewed strategy, I could defeat the big bad worm next time. According to Bullock, it played a key role in the struggle.
“His first opening attack, you immediately went to block it,” Bullock said as he prepared to fight the boss again. “I love how you picked it up right away; that was the intention.”
The combat was an accident on my part, but I immediately felt how effective it was, giving me half a second to back off and strategize at the very beginning of the encounter. “What I experienced with the fight was an angry attack,” Bullock explained. Some animals Hyper Light Breaker flash red and then make big moves that must be parried perfectly to deal damage, deflect projectiles, or stun the enemy. With a furious attack, imperfect combat will only reduce some of the damage.
“That’s definitely a design goal, to make combat clear, to know what you’re doing well,” Bullock said.
These moments of tactical clarity are exactly what makes a roguelike or roguelite addictive. I see how to beat the boss; Now I just have to be good enough at the game to pull off these moves before I get killed.
There is no dialogue Hyper Light Breakerlike its predecessor, Hyper Light Drifter. Drifter It was an incredibly stylish 2D action RPG that came out in 2016 after several years of crowdfunding and significant hype, and it cemented Heart Machine’s reputation as an excellent indie studio. Hyper Light Breaker it’s technically a prequel Driftersince it is set 15 years before the events of that game.
Drifter co-designer Teddy Dief created Team OFK and released the musical visual novel We OFKwhile lead developer Alx Preston stuck with Heart Machine and was released Sun ash in 2021. Very similar Fighter, Sun ash is set in the same general universe as Hyper Light Drifterbut it’s a very different game and not a direct sequel. Sun ash is a third-person action platformer built around an incredibly satisfying scrolling-step mechanic, and its world is filled with alien environments, massive monsters, and vaguely threatening gods.
“Hyper Light it was a way to get started, it was a way for me to be more grounded and to gather a crew and figure out, can I do this? Can I really make games?” Preston He told me in 2021during leadership Sun ashrelease of “And after answering that question, the natural next step for me was something in 3D. Can I put something in there that really opens up the world and makes you feel like you can actually run into something? “Most of my childhood was spent avoiding these great experiences.”
Fighter it feels like the perfect combination Hyper Light Drifter and Sun ash. change it Sun ash Skate on a hoverboard, add some friends and you’re good to go. At Heart Machine, the developers plan to keep Hyper Light Breaker About a year into early access, though, they noted that this timeline could change with player feedback.
Full release Hyper Light Breaker will support up to three players in online co-op, each choosing from several characters with customizable loadouts. I tried a simple, serrated knife and a large sword, plus a standard rifle and shotgun-style firearm, and each performed well, although I ran out of ammo quickly and often. A heavy sword was slower than a simple blade, but it moved smoothly and hit hard. In Cursed Factory before loading a new biome, I was also able to choose four abilities called Holobytes from about a dozen options, such as increased armor or faster healing. My favorite feature was the blooming corpse seed, which plants an exploding AOE flower on the corpses of slain enemies.
But once Bullock told me that hoverboarding was an option, that’s all I wanted to do. I spent a good chunk of my money Hyper Light Breaker demo time sliding along the bright green grass, landing small jumps and sometimes falling into a pond. I’m still itching to rediscover the Drone and refine my ability to transfer between a range of weapons (and corpse flowers). Mostly, I’ll be dreaming of that bright blue board Hyper Light Breaker gets early access this summer.
