It strikes me as a significant diversion from the narrow, room to room structure that’s become the common parlance of the roguelike genre lately. Most are combat-oriented – he fights a miniboss to gain access to one, another is guarded by several waves of smaller enemies – but one beacon he finds hidden inside a crumbling building that isn’t guarded at all, just tricky to find. I watch Preston track down a few beacons, each of which is accompanied by its own challenge. I’m not sure just yet if the movement tech will be quite as robust as Solar Ash, but letting players parkour their way around each biome freely was certainly the right lesson to take. Breakers can do more than just dash around the Overgrowth – they can climb, leap off cliffs and glide, and (my favorite) scoot around on a hoverboard, shooting off ramps and walls in a system clearly taking cues from Heart Machine’s recent Solar Ash. That familiarity is also aided by what looks to be some fun movement tech. While it’s hard to say more without actually having hands-on time, I’m optimistic that the transition from top-down to 3D combat won’t be too tough to make for those who loved Drifter. But the familiarity comes from a certain pleasant chunkiness that I loved from Hyper Light Drifter, where hits connect hard with satisfying sounds and reactions. There’s a wider array of weapons than before for stringing together combos, with customizable loadouts of melee and ranged weaponry alongside special abilities such as grenades and (my favorite) a giant cube that Preston dropped on enemies’ heads repeatedly. I'm optimistic that the transition from top-down to 3D combat won't be too tough to make for those who loved Drifter.įortunately for Drifter fans, combat in Breaker (at least visually) seems familiar. Preston starts out in a lovingly pink biome deeply reminiscent of the first area of Drifter, and begins zipping around in search of beacons as a number of small enemies pop up to waylay him. To do so, players have to take down multiple bosses across different procedurally generated biomes, each of which is gated behind multiple “beacons” that must be activated for each boss to appear. But it doesn’t seem easy to get to said Abyss King. There will be different character classes, he says, with different abilities as well as some degree of customizability.Īs a “Breaker,” players are sent out into the Overgrowth to take down minions of the Abyss King, the mysterious big bad at the heart of Hyper Light Breaker. He’s playing single-player, but tells me Hyper Light Breaker will include online cooperative multiplayer that’s flexible to wherever different players might be in the game’s story. I watch Preston putter briefly around a bustling hub city full of NPCs before he heads out into the world for a run. It’s a multiplayer 3D roguelike action game centered around players heading out from a hub into a procedurally generated world, defeating bosses, and returning to do it all again. Where Hyper Light Drifter was a single-player (at launch), top-down, action-adventure game, Hyper Light Breaker is a different genre entirely. Lacking explicit storytelling context and full of colorful mystery, it’s easy to recognize Breaker as a Hyper Light game on sheer force of aesthetic alone.īut aesthetic is where most of the at-a-glance similarities end. Everything I see is vaguely futuristic, but also ruinous, and somewhat overgrown, with characters and enemies alike fusing technology with vaguely shade-like presences and monstrous forms. But Breaker is a total gameplay departure from Drifter, so experiencing it through cryptic hints from Preston about what’s going on as he pummels his way through piles of enemies in rainbow-tinted biomes gives it even more of an aura of mystery.Īs with Drifter, Hyper Light Breaker’s world is awash in brilliant colors, littered with strange runes and ruins, and is completely devoid of actual language explaining what’s going on in it, with characters using pictograms to express their thoughts instead. Hyper Light Breaker was already a game told in strong imagery rather than language, with a story to be slowly puzzled out over time and significant effort. Watching developer Alx Preston walk me through some early Hyper Light Breaker gameplay at this year’s Game Developers Conference makes the already inscrutable world of Hyper Light feel even more esoteric.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |