Extradimensional
With Hyper Light Breaker, Heart Machine finds itself doing something that is increasingly rare. When polygons first took over from sprites, it was more commonplace. But a series moving from a top-down perspective to a fully three-dimensional world doesn’t happen often in 2024. So you can forgive a few teething issues translating combat that works beautifully from an overhead view on a single screen to a world where enemies can attack from any angle. Or perhaps the issue is ours – and we simply need to adjust to the fact that we can’t play Breaker as we did Drifter. Either way, the studio has the chance to fine-tune the game in Early Access. And when we’re not getting repeatedly destroyed, there is much to admire.