Hyper Light Breaker (2025)

I was right, they nerfed Blitz Blade and now instead of trading 35% health in favour of 200% damage, the damage increase is only 150%.

This I expected and am fine with.

What I’m not fine with is that you can no longer use your hoverboard during combat. This feels punitive. Not only was I using it to navigate around enemies and close attack distance, I was also using it to avoid enemy encounters when I was just trying to get to the extraction zone. Now, the moment you’re in range of an enemy, you can no longer use your hoverboard and you’re stuck running instead of hovering, which means enemies can easily catch up to you when in pursuit. It seems like a minor issue, but it’s putting a big damper on my enjoyment, because previously I could decide when I wanted to fight, and when I wanted to flee.

I also dislike that you can’t loot while in combat because the game regularly registers enemies within range even if you can’t see them and they don’t appear in your radar, which means looting is broken.

Both of these feel like a big step backward instead of an improvement and are hurting my sleeper to play.

That said, I do like the new playable character, Ravona. So maybe new gameplay mechanics will keep me coming back.

I genuinely can't bring myself to play anything other than this, despite having hit the limits of the current build. I'm usually not really into roguelikes, but I think I like this almost as much as Returnal, which is my favourite roguelike. I can't imagine how I'll feel when this is actually finished.

Like, can an early access game be a GOTY? I've never included an early access game in my list of favourites yet, even though I quite liked Hades 2 last year. But then again, I've played very few early access games.

I am excited to get a look at some of the other playable characters beyond the initial three. I hope they drop some of them the first of the quarterly updates.

There is a holobyte with the tooltip “Gain 200% Blade DMG, reduce HP by 35%.”

There is no way they won’t eventually nerf this, it’s way too powerful. It also stacks with other skills that increase blade damage, and if you equip them all for a boss fight you can kill bosses in under ten hits. It’s far too powerful, but it sure does make you feel unstoppable. And I’ll be honest, I’m always ready to give up health in favour of raw DPS, so this is my kind of accessory. But right now it almost feels like cheating, lol.

The third Crown arena is very, very bad. Visibility is terrible, the camera is getting stuck in pillars and walls, and I can’t dash because I’m constantly stuck on the terrain. The boss is very simple but the arena itself is preventing me from using my basic move set.

I’ve also discovered that Abyss Stones only seem to be dropped by the first Crown, which is an extremely poor design. This incentivizes you to farm Abyss stones from the first Crown by wasting your Rez until you reset the world. So instead of fighting the all three Crowns, one should fight one Crown, then die four times and repeat.

Not only does this increase the rate you farm Abyss stones, it also lets you farm Cores faster because you gain one for every four Prism bosses you fight, and there are only six per world refresh. Layer on top of that the fact that there are three chests with Cores available per world refresh, the faster you refresh, the fast you farm.

Obviously you could also refresh by defeating the Abyss King, but the risk to reward and work to reward of doing that is much lower than just farming the first Crown. They need to fix this ASAP because this makes for a very boring loop, but doing anything else won’t help you level your Breaker.

Ok, I’m reliably able to take out two of three crowns in a single run. I have. Died yet, but I did extract, so I don’t know if I could have defeated a third crown. Better safe than sorry. Even if I defeat the third crown, I’ll still have the Abyss King to deal with. But I’m progressing steadily, have a good idea of which weapons I gel with the most, and have unlocked the other playable characters (we are limited to three out of the total compliment during this Early Access period). The game is really starting to feel great and I’m genuinely curious what monthly patches, and major quarterly updates will bring since we’ve only benefitted from hotfixes this far.

Even in its Early Access form, I think there is a good chance this is going to make my list of favourites in 2025.

Despite its abundance of Early Access foibles, all I want to do is keep playing Hyper Light Breaker. I'm hooked on the loop, and I want more!!

Sadly I'm on hiatus from the game until I can get the new living spaces set up. And since it doesn't currently run the best on Steam Deck, I'll be taking a break. But that's ok, Citizen Sleeper II is just around the corner and should be perfect for Steam Deck.