After years of hype and multiple delays, Hyper Light Breaker finally arrived in Early Access on Steam last month. At last, players were able to dig into its moody mashup of loot, extraction shooter, and roguelite elements, and what they found wasn’t great. From its grueling boss fights to haphazard exploration, it was widely panned. The team behind the co-op game has now released a roadmap for upcoming fixes and new content drops, however, and says it has “no regrets” about soft-launching the game when it did.
“There is no amount of time you can spend in isolation that will make the game great,” lead producer at Heart Machine, Michael Clark, told PC Gamer this week. “You get the best version of a game by maximizing the amount of feedback-and-iteration loops you can go through, and Early Access is the way to do that for a title like this.”
With a “mixed” rating and only 63 percent positive reviews on Steam at the moment, there’s a lot of work to be done, which the studio has signaled in newly announced roadmap. A February 18 update promises a new playable character, more enemies, gear and combat rebalancing, and bug fixes. A similar raft of improvements, including more new content, is scheduled for March. April will be the big update, with a content drop called Buried Below that aims to improve onboarding and adds even more enemies and characters.
Hyper Light Breaker arrives as a spin-off to Hyper Light Drifter, the atmospheric 2016 2D Zelda-like that won hearts and minds as a Kickstarter pitch before becoming one of the last of a certain generation of retro-inspired indie darlings. Heart Machine also launched Solar Ash in 2021, a 3D action-adventure platformer that Breaker builds off of with crunchier combat and more RPG systems.
Early reviews have been brutal, however, from negative assessments by IGN and SkillUp to a steady stream of disheartening comments on the store page by Steam reviewers lamenting everything from the emptiness of procedurally generated maps players explore to the boss fights against Crowns they need to complete to progress. “This is more feedback for the devs than it is a review for players,” reads one negative Steam review. “The game is in an unacceptable state, even for Early Access. The onboarding experience is among the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’m a space flight sim player.”
I’ve only played a few hours of the game’s Early Access launch which didn’t feel like enough to render even a temporary verdict. But it was enough to convince me that while there’s lots of promise here, Hyper Light Breaker has too many rough edges for me to continue engaging with it in its current state. I will say that the ambiance and music, in keeping with Heart Machine’s past projects, are all top-notch. The gameplay just isn’t there yet, even for an Early Access game.
The new roadmap caters to many of the complaints currently littering the Steam page, especially the game’s difficulty, which has clearly struck many players less “very challenging” and more “sloppy and not fun.” At the same time, it’s an ambitious timeline for fixes that may be difficult to deliver on, given the project’s past delays as well as some layoffs at the studio late last year. If Heart Machine does deliver on its latest promises, Hyper Light Breaker could become the game fans of the studio were hoping to play in just a few months.
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