When Hyper Light Breaker launched into early access last month, almost ten years after the much beloved Hyper Light Drifter, it did so less with a bang, and more of a wet thud. The game, even in early access, just wasn’t quite ready yet, which is a real shame considering there’s some serious promise there. Still, there’s the potential for improvements, and Heart Machine has been hard at work deploying hotfixes post-launch. Even better than that, the first big update for the game is here, and it’s accompanied by a whole bunch of additions, fixes, and tweaks.
The biggest addition to Hyper Light Breaker is the brand new player character Ravona, who comes with a couple of neat abilities that sound good for players that like to play their roguelikes fast and loose. There’s the Reaper SyCom, a “high risk, high reward SyCom that has high damage potential for both Rails and Blades and high mobility but low health and armor.” And there’s also the Ranger SyCom, which is for “Breakers who want to shoot fast and shoot a lot with their Rails.”
Alongside that, there’s a few new Holobytes; pieces of tech that you can pick up that add various skills, including the Hunter’s Mark. This one tags enemies when you shoot them, meaning they take 20% extra melee damage. You’ll also find a couple of new enemies, like a variant of the Bullet Leaper, and a Croc Brute Elite, although you’ll have to hop into a round to find out what they do.
There’s a sweeping list of tweaks to general gameplay too, with one of the biggest being some changes to how the parry system works. Most notably, some new VFX has been added to make it clearer that the parry is “omni-directional (it will parry attacks coming from all directions),” but parrying an enemy will also now “flinch/interrupt the other nearby enemies,” with a greater effect if you get a perfect parry. You can check out the full list of changes, of which there are way too many to list here, in the patch notes over on Steam.
Of course, if you’d rather wait for Hyper Light Breaker to get a few more updates, but still want something else you can play with friends, you can check out our list of best multiplayer games. Or, if you’d rather play something closer to Hyper Light Drifter, there’s our list of best RPGs you can have a look through, too.
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