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When you buy an early access game, you are knowingly signing up for an unfinished experience.
But even by those standards, the day-one experience with Hyper Light Breaker fell short.
Performance issues and a stupefyingly punishing solo and new-player experience brought ona flood of negative Steam reviews.
Few people were more excited for Hyper Light Breaker than me.
I enjoyed Hyper Light Drifter immensely years ago and awarded near-top marks in ourSolar Ash review.
Community and PR manager Yiyi Zhang highlights the irony of a launch like this.
On one hand, it’s not necessarily the response you want.
Of course it would be better for everything to run and review splendidly.
But on the other, passionate criticism beats apathy, and the point of early access is to improve.
“Was it a rough launch?
In some ways, yes,” Zhang continues.
That absolutely did not happen and thats wonderful.
That all comes from true giving a damn."
The top priorities for now are bug fixes, performance improvements, and the aforementioned balance changes.
But design issues are more difficult.
These things aren’t so measurably working or not working.
Let’s start with one near and dear to my heart: the parry.
Simply put, Breaker’s parry ain’t great.
Heart Machine, you’ll be glad to hear, is working on it.
“Our parry has gone through a lot of changes over the course of development,” Clark explains.
The issues with the parry demonstrate deeper problems with Breaker’s combat.
More of these “scaling factors” will be added over time.
The player’s attacks, namely our gun-like Rails, are getting attention, too.
“you’re able to expect to see buffs to certain weapons,” he teases.
In some ways, this is working as intended.
But for new and average players, adding one precious medkit to the starter kit helped a lot.
As you ease into Breaker, clarity can be a sticking point outside of combat, too.
Misunderstandings born of lacking tutorials can contribute to that fog of difficulty.
“Part of the fun of a Roguelike is figuring out how the game works, too.”
Weve been hard at work on a robust tutorial that will be coming in a future update.
Getting players up to speed ought to make it easier to add and contextualize all-new content.
It sounds like we’ll see the open-world side of the game shine through a bit more.
In short, everything is on the table.
The divisive gear durability?
The devs are exploring “potential changes” that will be tested in a future preview.
The oddly quiet soundtrack?
Hyper Light Breaker stumbled at the start, but the message from Heart Machine is ‘better and more.’
Here’s hoping the game truly hits its stride soon.
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