Hyper Light Breaker News

Hyper Light Breaker early access review - extraction roguelike needs more time

2016 was an exceptional year for indies. In just a few short months, the world was introduced to instant classics like Stardew Valley, Inside, Cuphead, Darkest Dungeon, and Firewatch, to name but a few. Amid this barrage of critical darlings, Alx Preston's Heart Machine made a strong debut with Hyper Light Drifter. A dark fantasy homage to 16-bit RPGs, Hyper Light Drifter was the definition of a Kickstarter success story, propelled to cult status by tens of thousands of backers. Eight years later, it's clear that Heart Machine is not content to be a one-hit wonder. Thus we come to Hyper Light Breaker, the studio's third title and a very different beast.

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Medkit Rework & Player Suggestions Hotfix v0.51c.108329

[h2]A QUICK NOTE FROM HEART MACHINE[/h2]

Thank you all SO much again for your continued support and feedback after a very exciting Early Access launch week for us! Last week was a big week for us -- it was incredible to see you all jump into the Overgrowth for the very first time and share your feedback with us along the way. We’ve received a ton of incredible feedback, and on our end, we’re already heads down in development as we’re jumping into making and planning changes to the game based on your all’s suggestions.

As a studio, this has been our most ambitious project yet – making an open world roguelite (which there aren’t that many out there!) -- and so, we’re beyond thrilled to make our vision for Hyper Light Breaker a reality alongside you all throughout the course of Early Access. We made Hyper Light Breaker with Early Access in mind to have it grow and evolve with our community, and today’s patch represents that as we made some pretty big changes, including a rework on Medkits, thanks to your feedback.

Today’s patch (and the one before it) is just the beginning of us using your feedback to shape the game – so you can expect even more community-driven patches and updates (see our first hotfix blog for more details on update cadence) We will be shifting the full team onto our first planned Minor Update so expect this to be the last hotfix for the time being. We are working on an Early Access content roadmap and planned to release it this week, but we need just a little more time to flesh it out and incorporate changes to it based on player suggestions. What we can say for now is there’s SO much more to come, so stay tuned!

Just a friendly reminder, the best way to ensure we see your feedback and concerns is to post it in the #hlb-support channel on our Discord: www.discord.gg/heartmachine.

That all said, let’s dive into patch notes for today’s hotfix v0.51c.108329!

~ Michael Clark, Lead Producer, and the Heart Machine team

[h2]TODAY’S PATCH NOTES[/h2]

Note: Anything listed as a “COMMUNITY ASSIST” and “COMMUNITY SUGGESTION” are fixes made thanks to our awesome community of players! We really appreciate all of your support and feedback – so please keep it coming!

[h3]Gameplay Changes[/h3]

COMMUNITY SUGGESTION: Medkit rework

Players now start with a Medkit.
The first Medkit upgrade available via Pherus Bit now improves Medkits.
Medkits now auto-refill on launch of run, up to max capacity (default 1, upgradeable to 2).
Medkit refills at Shrines are now paid for with Bright Blood, not Medigems.
Medigems still provide a small amount of health still when harvested, but are no longer used for Medikits or used in the end-of-cycle screen.

Enemy updates

COMMUNITY SUGGESTION: Removed the tech croc brute and white dirks from the extraction spawn table.
COMMUNITY SUGGESTION: Increased time between waves of additional enemies in Crown fights.
Projectiles from weak enemies no longer hit-stun the player.
Flinch animations will play, but the player will have full control. Previously they played a hit impact that momentarily interrupted them.
Fixed an issue where damage trails would cause hit-stun on contact.
Enemy aggro distance reduced.
Removed some enemies from the Drop Down Lab spawns that weren't supposed to be spawning there (or at all).

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

COMMUNITY ASSIST: Fixed a bug where some players would get stuck on a black screen when launched.
COMMUNITY ASSIST: Fixed a memory leak causing degrading performance over time.

Patch Notes - v0.5.1b.107995

Note: See our previous Hot Fix and Letter from Heart Machine here: PATCH NOTES v0.5.1.107947

The best way to ensure we see your feedback and concerns is to post in the #hlb-support channel on our Discord: www.discord.gg/heartmachine.

Thank you to all of our players who graciously sent us crash dumps when encountering this issue. They helped us address the issue while we continued to work to reproduce the issue internally, as it is affecting only a portion of users and configurations.
We were able to do so, and have verified that this update addresses the crash we were seeing on those crash dumps.

Bug Fixes:

COMMUNITY ASSIST: Fixed a crash on startup related to cloud save handling.

Hyper Light Breaker early access review: a flashy but hollow roguelike with few of Drifter’s charms

There’s a lot you can do with a third dimension. Texture. Nativity dioramas. Spheres. Hyper Light Breaker, in expanding from the 2D action of Hyper Light Drifter, chooses to almost entirely remake itself as a free-roaming roguelike, trading post-apocalyptic pixel art for big proc-gen vistas and even more acrobatic swordplay.

Its technical ambition, sadly, ends up undermined by the emptiness of its world, the lack of exploratory pleasure that Drifter nurtured so well, and combat that’s more faithful to the original yet doesn’t quite adapt well enough to 3D. Not to mention it has more than its fair share of early access bugs and, especially in the early stages, balancing missteps.

It doesn't seem like that long ago that if developers released a game and it had bugs or technical troubles, well, that was it - that was the game, forever. But between Cyberpunk 2077, No Man's Sky, and several other examples, things are different now, and it's possible to salvage a struggling new release with updates and patches. Hyper Light Breaker has choked on Steam so far, but developer Heart Machine isn't resting. While the roguelike has middling user reviews, owing largely to complaints about performance, its creator issues a statement addressing the feedback it's had so far, what it's doing to remedy the technical woes, and its plans for more repairs in the future.