Roguelikes are an exercise in doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome. Their difficulty spikes come with built-in footholds - because you’re expected to fail over and over, you improve your skills and learn with each failed attempt even if you don’t realise it. In the words of one of Tom Cruise’s most underrated movies: Live Die Repeat. But Hyper Light Breaker challenges that.

Breaker is a procedurally generated roguelike, so every time you die, you’re given a completely different level to play through. Except it’s not every time you die, since you get five lives before the cycle resets. So where a roguelike is ‘try as many times as you like but do the whole thing in one shot’, Hyper Light Breaker is more ‘you get five tries to do this one specific part then you never, ever see this level again’.

It’s a cool concept, one that plays around with the roguelike structure in the sort of imaginative ways the genre needs. For every great roguelike, several other average ones flood the marketplace with blandness. I don’t know if Hyper Light Breaker is great. But it certainly isn’t bland.

In some ways, I don’t feel like I got the true Hyper Light Breaker experience at Summer Game Fest. The dev told me I was pretty lucky with my random landing spot, meaning that while some players had to fight across biomes to face the boss, I just had to scurry past one cluster of enemies to arrive at its gates. But maybe getting a lucky break is the true Hyper Light Breaker experience. Getting a lucky break and then blowing it with the boss on just a sliver of health left certainly is.

Because of this, it’s difficult to know how the procedural generation stacks up. I spent some time wandering into new temples, and finding swarms of enemies roaming in random patches that felt effectively surprising. It’s also interesting that some elements are indicated on the map - like the bosses and smaller enemies that may drop rewards - while others aren’t.

Obviously, I don’t have a full list of what isn’t on the map, but one thing I found was a shrine monolith. These let you escape from the world and go back to the hub (where you can heal up, trade in your loot, and buy better gear) without losing a life. This summons an ‘assassin’, basically a roaming boss, that you must evade rather than defeat as you make your way to a random extraction point.

I was told I was lucky to land so close to a monolith, unlucky to have the assassin be so close by, and lucky that the extraction zone was also so close. Add in the boss and that’s four slices of luck for me, though one landed against me rather than for. Both roguelikes and procedurally generated games rely on luck anyway, but combining them this way seems to be highly detrimental. Maybe I’m just unlucky (that’s now five) enough to be an outlier.

Luck was also mentioned a lot when it came to the weapons I found or what the stores had in stock, but I think that’s more just the dev being excited about all the tools in their game. However, this was the area that felt the most disappointing. My ‘grenade’ was actually a huge robot thing that didn’t seem to do anything but occasionally draw the attention of the weakest enemies, and all of the melee weapons felt identical, while the parry was way too unforgiving. Guns fared better, but with sparse bullets it mainly came down to fast-paced melee action that was good, but way too similar.

The parry is being tweaked to allow for a longer time window for it to be effective.

Hyper Light Breaker is a fascinating and creative game, but I left my playthrough wondering just how good it was. I enjoyed it enough, but I hope my experience is on the outer edge of luck for the procedural stuff and the finished game gives the exploration more weight and makes more of the parts that make Hyper Light Breaker unique.

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Hyper Light Breaker

Roguelike Action Systems Released 2024 ESRB m Developer(s) Heart Machine Publisher(s) Arc Games Engine Unreal Engine 4 Multiplayer Online Co-Op Franchise Hyper Light Early Access Release January 14, 2025
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WHERE TO PLAY

DIGITAL

Hyper Light Breaker is a sequel set in the fully 3D world of the Overgrowth. You'll take on the Crowns and the deadly Abyss King solo or with friends in co-op play.

Platform(s) PC Powered by Expand Collapse