Review of Hyper Light Drifter

Intro

Hyper Light Drifter is a hack-n-slash action RPG in the vein of Dark Souls and its main inspiration the Zelda series. You play as The Drifter, the blue-skinned protagonist that travels through the world in order to do... Something...

Story Analysis

Which brings me to the first problem that I have with this game.The story is told in a rather unique way. Instead of relying on typical text-based conversations. The game's NPCs instead draw the scene involved, asking you, the player, to fill in the details. While this is sound in theory, after all you are letting the players fill in the gaps of the story, it does not do enough to create an understanding of the world and the world's history. However, the story itself is pretty engrossing even without the details. The world is fascinating, it's characters while not very deep, carry a hard to describe emotional weight. Most of them, were affected in one way or another by the main antagonists of the story and the aforementioned drawings of their hardship and tragedies really do motivate you to avenge them.

Visuals

The game's pixel art design allows for the creation of a very strange world and it's something that I do appreciate. The landscapes and scenes created are amazing and some of the color-design choices do well to differentiate the areas that you visit. Like I mentioned before, there are no text based conversations in this game. And to the credit of the developers and the art team, the pixel art style carries the narrative of the game throughout. There are some slight issues here and there. The fixed camera angles and isometric view means that sometimes enemies are hidden behind walls. It's not often, but when it does happen you inevitably lose a previous health-bar or two.

Sound

The game's ambient soundtrack is basically a trip down to the 80s. Heavy synth-bass and easily repeatable melodies. All of the areas you visit have their own theme associated with them and all but one fit the bill perfectly. Your character's sword swings and weapons fire audio is decent. More importantly each weapon's audio signature is different enough that you can recognize the weapon your using based off of sound itself.

Gameplay

The game is focused heavily on it's tough-as-nails and reflex heavy combat. You only have 5 health-bars and a limited number of health packs. Enemies typically deal 1 to 2 damage with their attacks and there is no invulnerability phase after getting hit, which means you can and will get stun-locked to death if you don't watch your spacing. The game does give you ample tools to combat this though. Your weapon has a 3-hit basic combo. Your character has a dash to weave in and out of battle. You also get a basic pistol at the start that helps to deal damage to enemies that are closing in and ranged ones as well.

You'll meet a variety of enemies that use a variety of attacks. As you'd expect, the longer the animation of an attack, the more damage it deals. This is true of almost everything in Hyper Light Drifter. However, you do get stun-locked upon taking [b]]ANY [/b] form of damage. So stacked sequences of light attacks are often time more dangerous than eating a heavy attack. In between bouts of combat, you will explore the game's dungeons. These are a well-crafted series of forced-combat rooms, traps, puzzles and dashing segments. Sometimes, these rooms combine elements from the previous sentence. These are few and far in-between, at least until you get to the end-game dungeon, but they ramp up the difficulty in a great way and the exploration mechanics are solid. Health-packs are scattered throughout the areas you are traveling and there are plenty of secrets littered throughout the map. I am very sure I didn't find any of them but from research, these secrets unlock cloaks with different abilities and modifiers.

I don't have a lot of complaints with the game-play mechanics. The game is designed in such a way that you could technically finish the game without any of the upgrades that you buy in the shops in the main town. However, it will make the game significantly harder. If there is one complaint I do have, is that the frames for consecutive dashing are all over the place. It might be a personal issue, but sometimes I could pull off 7-8 dashes no problem and then fail to even pull of 2 if I tried it again. It's frustrating but then again, there really wasn't anything that demanded dashing that many times (that I found at least).

Conclusion

In short, Hyper Light Drifter is a great game that mixes hard and fast combat with dungeon crawling sequences. I'm not a great fan of the narrative. But the initial premise was super interesting. It took me 5 hours to beat the game. However, hunting for the secrets, the boss-rush mode and New Game + (which puts you at 2 health permanently) can definitely increase playability. I recommend playing this game and checking it out when you can. For $20, you get a great combat system, immersive atmosphere and a nice soundtrack that really ties the package together. If you are looking for a short, great game that will stick with you long after its done, then please do yourself a favor and buy this game.