Hyper Light Breaker has great combat, impeccable vibes, and its ambitious randomized open worlds actually work⁠—the real test is if it goes the distance in early access

At the end of 2024, I got to try one last hour-long preview of Hyper Light Breaker ahead of its early access launch on January 14. It does the thing: This is a great action game that nails the look and feel of Hyper Light Drifter in a 3D open world. Now there are two big questions remaining: How is it as a roguelike you play again and again, and how will it come together over the course of early access?

Breaker's basic combat and traversal really haven't been in question for me since I first tried a preview build of the game early last year. It feels great in the hand: Fun, engaging combat with a Souls-y emphasis on precise dodging or countering, but a character action game's sense of speed. Moving around the world via hoverboard or Zelda paraglider is similarly great, and also shows off the procedural generation system Heart Machine has been cooking up.

If I hadn't been told the seed I was exploring had been procedurally generated, I could have believed it was handmade the old-fashioned way. Ravines, cliffs, and mountains chop up the map and require thoughtful navigation to get around⁠—apparently Heart Machine specifically wanted to avoid Skyrim "jump up the mountain" behavior, so every natural obstacle has an attendant ramp, pass, or other way around you're expected to find. During my session, we encountered an underground lab, an apparently rarer map feature with desirable rewards, and I'm excited to see if there are other surprises like that in store.

What I'm really curious about is just how much the map will change between runs, how much a new version of the map will be able to replicate the surprise and excitement of first stepping into an open world, and if the proc gen seams will become more apparent over the course of many runs. There are multiple potential biomes to keep things fresh, though, with more promised as early access progresses.

Hyper Light: Showdown

One of my biggest questions about Breaker was how it would encourage or even allow for thoughtful exploration if it had a time crunch like Risk of Rain 2, and thankfully Breaker addresses this in two ways I really like. First, your exploration isn't limited by time, but by productive actions you take out in the world⁠—I was reminded of how the clock in Disco Elysium only advances when you engage in dialogue. Hyper Light Breaker's danger meter will tick up as you acquire loot and keys to boss rooms or defeat enemies and bosses, increasing the volume and strength of enemies out in the open world.

The second design move is that Breaker is pretty much an extraction game: Rather than the world getting reset on your death, you essentially have a few lives to burn for a given iteration of the world. Progress like keys, looted points of interest, and most importantly defeated bosses are maintained between expeditions of a given run, while extracting early will reset the danger level without expending one of your lives. Sustained between wider runs/map resets, Breaker has the usual sort of roguelike meta progression: There are vendors at your home base to upgrade and support, character build configurations to acquire and upgrade, and alternate characters to unlock⁠—three at early access launch, with more on the way. Each character seems able to use every weapon, and I was told that their equippable, build-defining stat loadouts are what will really differentiate them, but I haven't seen how that works in practice.

That's pretty much where I'm at writ large going into Breaker's early access launch: Everything I've seen, experienced, or been told is exciting and encouraging, but it's going to take some time with the game in the wild to see if its long game has what it takes to offer the "infinite replayability" Heart Machine is going for.