I didn't want to post this until I "beat" the game (killing the game's 2 bosses enough times to reset the world without dying 4 times) and now that I have I'll provide thoughts.

< This review will change to positive in the future because I have faith in the developers >


1. HLB's core gameplay loop is not a rogue-like, but rather an extraction shooter. You keep a cache of weapons and equipment at your upgradeable "home base," and choose which items to take into a very threatening map so that you can scavenge for more items. You die *very* quickly, so you won't bring in your most valuable items unless you have a high-priority objective in mind, like killing a map boss. Bring materials back to base, get passive upgrades to let you survive longer on the map, etc. This is more akin to Escape from Tarkov than Hades or Risk of Rain 2.
Critically, extraction shooters punish exploration and experimentation. Stick your neck out too far, misstep, and you lose whatever equipment you took with you into the field. Trying to fight everything results in failure and loss and despair, generally.

2. HLB's combat, however, is nothing like an extraction shooter. Having recently beat Bloodborne for the first time, I find combat in HLB most similar to a soulsborne. Enemies deal immensely high damage, no less than 1/8th of total player HP for a low-damage attack, but the game equips players with a very fluid moveset including dashes, parries, and weapon combos. Guns are not intended to be a player's primary damage source unless specific steps are taken, and understanding of attack timings as well as one's own equipment is essential to succeed.
Soulsborne games reward experimentation and repeated engagement. Don't understand a boss? Fight it again. And again and again until you understand its timings, its phases, and its every weakness, until your dodges and parries come before you can comprehend them. Death is integral in soulsborne games and offers a learning experience every time.

Do you see the problem? HLB is attempting to combine a core loop that punishes death with a combat system that rewards death and even requires it for success.

How this plays out in-game: I am lucky enough to collect high-tier loot with good status modifiers, and I decide to challenge a boss (the central objective of any run). I make my way across the map to the boss arena, enter, and the first flurry of attacks takes nearly all of my HP, as it would in any soulsborne game. I use up my singular health kit (maybe one of the maximum two if I've killed bosses previously), fight valiantly against the boss, and die. This causes me to lose multiple pieces of equipment that were integral to my boss-fighting setup, and now if I re-enter the boss arena I'll be wielding a completely different weapon or equipment that I'm not used to. As a result, I die again, and now I have to reset my world and collect the keys to enter the boss arena in the first place. This gets me out of practice against the boss's moveset, and next time I scrape together enough loot to fight it, I lose again. The loss of equipment after a failed engagement bars players from the learning they need should they wish to improve at the game's combat system.


Below are MY OPINIONS and DO NOT REFLECT THE SAME GAME DESIGN EXPERIENCE THE DEVELOPERS HAVE. THIS IS THEIR GAME, NOT MINE.

HEALTH REWORKS: Health economy needs a full rework. Bloodborne grants the player a default health kit capacity of TWENTY. "Wow, that sounds super lenient-" NO. Because enemies in that game, like in this one, have extremely punishing attacks that can combo the player into oblivion. The extensive healing allowance in that game facilitates learning without sending players to a checkpoint too frequently. In HLB, this would look like the player receiving a health kit every time they pick up a Medigem, or starting with 5+ health kits with slightly reduced healing ability at the beginning of each run. There are ways to heal on the game's map, but these often fill less than 1/3 of the player's health bar, and that kind of healing disappears with a single enemy attack.

PARRY REWORKS: Parries should be omni-directional. Enemies are programmed specifically to encircle the player, and will attack simultaneously from multiple directions. Having to turn and look at an attacking enemy to parry is very frustrating and unachievable. Additionally, parries should always (at the very least) interrupt a boss's combo, if not grant a full stagger. Souls games with similar combat reward the player with a high-damage, follow-up "visceral" attack that can grant health. Parries in this game do not grant a heal (except very inconsistently?) and do not interrupt attacks. This means the parry's "recovery" animation leaves players vulnerable to the next attack in a boss's combo.

LOOT REWORKS: With such a small equipment inventory, minor stat increases do not scratch the roguelike itch. I want to swap between items that fundamentally alter my build, not a 20% increase to this type of damage vs that type of damage. These minor stat boosts work in a roguelike such as Risk of Rain, where you pick up an unlimited number of items that accumulate into a godly build, but HLB doesn't offer that flexibility so it would be nice for my choice items to have a big impact.

GENERAL REWORKS: Bosses should not spawn additional smaller enemies in their arenas. I imagine this is intended to stimulate builds that grant additional damage/crit-chance/whatever after killing an enemy, but what really happens is I'm trying to hit the boss and a dog takes 20% of my health off from outside of my melee range, staggers me, and the boss follows up with a massive attack. These are horrible to deal with in solo play and only amended by having a second player chase down all the small enemies during a boss fight. Multiplayer boss fights need a boss HP increase or moveset change, NOT more minions to distract from the giant blindfolded church-beast attacking you (sound familiar?).

Weapons should not be lost on death, straight up. Instead, let me scavenge status modifiers and perks to attach to my base, separately upgraded weapons. It is so unreasonably punishing to die with a specific blade/rail combo and have to adapt to a whole new build for the same boss fight, with the game's current boss difficulty.


Thanks for reading all those complaints. Here's what I like:
- Combat is straight up buttery. It is so smooth and so befitting for its souls-like nature. I love being able to cancel a swing with a dash, and exit a dash with my weapon already in an enemy's face. The hits feel super heavy and I LOVE that certain attacks will slow an enemy's animation down. Status effects the player can apply are integral to loadout construction, which is neat.
- Map traversal is very satisfying. The hoverboard is so fun to traverse on and I am always looking for ramps like this is a Skate game. If there was loot locked behind a hoverboard course I'd be in heaven.
- Character and enemy designs look good. I especially like that enemies have multiple tiers with different attacks, so that the current difficulty level is immediately visible from a glance at the opps.
- Weapon variety feels good, I love to mix up my kit (when I can find a weapon that's half as good as my current legendary)

Thanks for reading. Will update this to positive in the future.

I think the game definitely has some great potential, the developers have been quick to respond to feedback and they have even reworked systems in a very short time since the release.

BUT I think the game has some big flaws in it's gameplay loop that makes me have to give this a negative review which I am fully ok with changing down the line.

So here is some of thoughts on the overall game.


What I REALLY enjoy:

-Combat feels amazing. The hits feel like they carry weight, the dash strike combat feels alot like a 3d Hades. You can dash cancel almost any attack and you can even parry while aiming and shooting your guns. My only minor gripe is how the heavy attacks kinda lock you into a animation with heavy end-lag, but I have come to just accept that as a risk and reward factor and using it when you know you will not get hit.

-Art. I really love the look and feel of the game. The character designs are great and there is just something really beautiful about the artstyle they are going for. Really love all the small UI looks matching the UI Hyper Light Drifter used. Almost in a sense feels nostalgic to play this.


Things I liked:

-Rising tension as you explore. I really like that you have a sense of "get out before it gets too dangerous kind vibes. Before I got good loot and little to no meta progression, it always scared me to stay around to the middle mark of the difficulty bar, since I knew there was an assassin looming on the horizon. Though I wish when you reached max difficulty it would spawn Assassins more frequently, seeing as them only spawning on the middle mark kinda ruins the scaryness when you get past that assassin. Overall I like the feature but could need improvements.

-Prisms and Loot. I enjoy the way you have to gather the Prisms (was that the name?) to be able to unlock the bosses. It pushes you to certain locations on the map and makes you explore more than if you could just rush straight to the boss even on runs where you are cracked on loot. Also some of the prism enemies can be real toughies (the range guy is absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in early game lol). I also do find it nice that we can cache weapons and gadgets to sell in the base after an extraction, since it gives me more reason to go loot even when I have a cracked build as it gives me more resources to further enhance my builds.


Things I didn't like:

-Perks. The perks in this game are very limited in what they offer and some are just mandatory to keep if you find them. As an example, if you find the perk that gives you health back on crits (actual health, not red health) you pretty much just have to keep it, since it might be THE best perk in the game. It kinda removes a whole point of buildcrafting when there is no real drawbacks to such a perk. Usually a perk like that would have a heavy drawback like "crits heal you, but you have 60% of your total max HP". Which makes you actually think about not taking it since you will be squishy BUT you can recover HP. Too many perks basically have no drawbacks essentially.

-Lack of tutorial. It took me... literally, 11 hours of gameplay, before I noticed you can dash on walls vertically. There is so many non-explained features. Even with game intuition from playing other games some stuff I couldn't figure out certain things. I went into one of the menues in the game and saw that "Red glowing enemy means you have to parry it, since it goes through your dash invincibility". Every gaming bone in my body told me "ah red glowy enemey, I need to dodge that un-parryable attack" since that is how it has been done in every recent souls-like. Even just a tiny popup when you fail to parry such an attack would have helped. You cannot expect every player to go into the menues to learn something like that especially when this feature exists in other games and it works the opposite way here. Basic tutorial popups is MASSIVELY needed.


What I REALLY disliked:

-Not able to cache perks. This one really pissed me off. There is so much build craft potential with the game and having characters with different like classes and ♥♥♥♥. But since you cannot cache perks, you just get 1 good build once and then you just do that, forever. You are completely discouraged to swap any perks out if you have good ones already since you cannot stash them away and they will just be lost to the world when you extract. This is an extraction game so we should be able to stash away perks for future runs or to gear other characters for their unique class builds. But this also leads me into my other big dislike.

-This is not a Rogue game. If you get one god build. This game is just an action combat extraction game. If you clear a run you don't lose any durability, so if you have a god build going, that's it, that's your game for the rest of your playthroughs. That 1 same build over and over leveling up your meta progression. There needs to be a hard delete on your items after completing a run or some form of durability loss. This would go great with the above as if you could stash away perks and such. You could make sure you have perks and weapons for your next run, while taking your god build to ensure a clear of your current run, but losing it in the process. A roguelike/lite is all about RESETTING. If the game doesnt reset you then it's not a rogue game. This is what eventually made me want to review this game negatively because the game loop is just over for me right now. I have a 3 crystal gadgets, with them giving me 45% extra armor, I have insanely good perks making me steamroll any boss or mob in the wild, I heal on crits and I have 2 medkits for the few times I take more damage than what my crits can heal. I just go loop and loop and loop, clearing with ease. But at that point what is the roguelike aspect? I just go in with same build same character nothing really resets other than vendors, world and what bosses I meet. Idk, I really feel this a giant flaw in the design rn and its the core thing keeping me from recommending the game or trying to get any friends along for the ride (and yeah I have only played solo).


To end on I wanna say, thanks alot to the devs of the game for the quick patches and responding to the community. I am a big fan of the Hyper Light universe and really want to see this game thrive. While there are aspects of the game I really dislike I think you have something really special cooking here and I hope you keep staying in the kitchen until this comes out as a 5 star gourmet meal.

They make a bad job at telling you just how early access this game is.
As of right now you can unlock 3 of around 10 characters. That's fine. What is not fine is that we only have 2 Boss types as of now. In a roguelike. with 3 bosses leading up to a final boss. If you are unlucky you get to fight the same boss 3 times in a row and if you win you get rewarded with a still image of "yeah the final boss isnt here yet have fun starting a new run". Not even some makeshift alternative challenge.

The only good thing about this game is its design and the combat. Contentwise it feels like a pre alpha.