Hyper Light Drifter Review
Hyper Light Drifter
Publisher: Heart Machine
Developer: Heart Machine
Genre:
PEGI: Teen
Comments:
When most people think of Indie Games, they don’t expect an extremely difficult game that tosses close-quarters combat, and a major focus on dodging and blocking attacks from super strong enemies. But that’s exactly what Hyper Light Drifter by Developer , Heart Machine is , a crazy hard 2D action role-playing game.
The Games opening cut scene, shows Hyper Light Drifter’s protagonist surviving an apocalyptic attack, anything else about the game is really up to your own interpretation and imagination, as the game really doesn’t tell you much else. The game doesn’t have a real story or narrative, the game’s story plays out based on environmental storytelling; as you move to new areas the environment changes and this is how you know what to expect next. Although this Environmental Storytelling is enjoyable, and allows you to play the areas in whatever order you wish, it also has its downside; not only are you not told what’s going on, you’re not told where to go, and sometimes even when you try to explore to discover the right path to advance in the game, you just simply can’t discover it.
Most fights take place in close-quarters, where waves upon waves of enemies just keep spawning. Survival requires dashing, getting off a few sword hits, dashing away from the counter attack and picking off a fierce melee foe with your guns. Now remember how I talked about the game being crazy hard earlier? The margin of error is non-existent; If a fight starts to go the wrong way, you’ll probably take your five damage before you can find a break long enough to pop a med kit off, which makes the game super punishing.
Most of the game’s enemies take tons of damage to go down, requiring you to keep your perfect rotation of dodging and counter-attacking going for a few solid minutes. Most of the boss’s also summon minions to get in the way of that sequence, but when you do defeated that one boss , man does is it ever feel good.
Now, do I recommend buying and playing Hyper Light Drifter? Absolutely the game is amazing when it comes to environmental and game design. Do I enjoy the Dark Souls difficulty level? Not at all , and I didn’t expect this challenge from an Indie Game at all but that’s what makes this game enjoyable and not feel like an indie and more a bigger title.
Trailer
Article By FncWill
Will is a long time veteran to the Game Review world. Will is a QA Tester of not only Video Games, but also tons of other tech products and more for multiple company's . He also runs his own Gaming Youtube Network , and can almost always be found on Xbox.
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