Hyper Light Drifter

Love this game, fresh and unorthodox! I've got the true pleasure playing this game. The game just sucks you in and will not let you go until you finish it! The 2D graphics is beatiful, picture on screen is full of color and brightness. Movable backgrounds, smooth animation, scripted video clips on the eingine are amazing! The controls is a little bit treaky, but the player will get to used to it. After several hours of playing on the keyboard the controls became not so irritating. Besides, the game has option to change default 'jumping' attitude so the Drifter jumps in direction where he moves. The one of the dissapointing moments is the sound, or the lack of it. During the fight player will listen only Drifters jumping sound, sounds of his weapons, sounds of enemys weapons or their groaning. The exceptions are clips, but obviously they are rare. So the sound is poor. The last dissapointing moment is storytelling. There is no such thing as storytelling, the player is forced to understand about what is going on the screen, only groaning 'NPCs' with bubbles of images or video clips are only hints for the plot, No aduible or textual dialogs.

The game is beautiful, the soundtrack is stunning. It manages to evoke an air of mysetry and foreboding without a single line of dialogue with its clever use of visual design. If it was a walking simulator then it would shatter all expectations. However, its not a walking simulator, it is a fast paced hack & slash game with an unforgiving learning curve and a heavy emphasis on platforming. It is in these crtitical areas of gameplay that it falters and leaves much to be desired. The combat is hectic at the best of times, its very easy to lose yourself in the sea of sprites and abilities that tend to fill the small arenas one tends to fight in. There is also an issue with certain enemies where their invulnerability frames don't actually line up with the length of the animation, leading to attacks that just don't land. Giving the character momentum is an amazing idea. It helps give their movement and combat weight, it also helps convey a defference in size between you and the massive enemies you face. This does work well with the way traps and attacks are implemented in the game. There are often situations when ice traps and attacks from massive enemies end up taking control away from you until you die if you get hit once. This happens by these attacks/traps rolling you while you keep taking damage until you die, this can happen from full hp to zero if you are unlucky. The dashing mechanic itself has been the most frustrating design feature for me. I don't mind spending hours trying for figure out boss patterns and perfecting my combat skills and reaction times until I am able to do the rest of the content in this game or any other. I will not, however, spend that amount of time trying to master a movement ability that operates barely within average human reaction times and has a variable rythm. With all these flaws I still recommend that you try the game, they only become truly glaring when you are trying to be a completionist.

It's like Furi but worse, since there are some serious frame drops lol. I really don't understand the need to make the dash go towards the cursor and not where your character is facing, specially when you need to face the enemies to shoot/slash them. Idk if this is to try to be different, or to add a layer of artificial difficulty, or what, but it is really counter intuitive and akward. Specially since every other game I play lets me dash towards the direction I'm facing. The art style is very charming and beautiful, but I play games for the mechanics, if I wanted to see nice things I would just look at art. It's very dissapointing since I really wanted to get into the game, but the controls seem bent on trying to stop me.

If ARPG's are your genre, stop reading, and buy this game. This game has elements of 90's ARPGs like the Secret of Evermore that have made ARPG's my favorite gaming genre. Hyperlight Drifter uses a pixilated art style that is reminiscent of the 16-bit era without looking sloppy. The story line is straightforward and mysterious, and dialogue is delivered in a series pictures. Never is a true word is spoken by any character in the game, but at no point are you as the player lost as to what is happening -- there is just enough of a push for you as a player to find out more. The game play is fun and addictive. As the drifter you are able to dash and slash enemies, or shoot the baddies with a plasma gun. The bosses are challenging and their defeat gives you a sense of reward when you finally crush them. I do have some issue with the controls: there are dashing puzzles that require precise timing to complete successfully. The game is unforgiving in this respect and can lead to explosive bouts of frustration. Also, I find that the controls have the Drifter prone to falling of cliffs (see aforementioned explosive frustration). The music complements the game well it provides the gameplay with an eerie ambience. Don't expect an epic music score. The music is more simple than the orchestrated pieces in blockbuster hits, but by no means is Hyperlight Drifter's soundtrack ineffective. Overall, I think this game is great. I love it. A solid 9.5/10. (Review transferred from my steam account; 53.5hr of game play recorded)

Spent countless hours trying to figure out the chain dash rhythm. So many hours that I have gotten to the point where the game become so unbearable frustrating from trying to even get the chained dash to be consistent, that I decided that I was no longer having any fun playing the game, and I have lost I any motivation to continue or finish it. By the time I got to the crystal spike area in the Western zone, and watching my character for the 100th time, with full health, miss the timing by a half a second, then get stabbed, skid, stabbed again, skid, and stabbed for a final death. I just quietly put down the controller, went to the main menu and uninstalled the game. Not worth by sanity, because the devs decided to implement a chain-dashing technique that is required to progress through the game that does not fit the rhythm of the game mechanics or the background music. I tried endlessly to get the rythyym down but the punishing demand of the timing makes this game not worth my time. I have watched videos and read articles on how to properly chain-dash, but after 42+ hours into the game, I can't get it to work. So I am disappointed in not being able to finish the game, but also can't take any more of the frustration of countless attempts to practice in open areas and not get anything close to what I am seeing in these "tutorial" vids. The only 7 chain-dash streak I was able to get didn't make any sense on how I did it. So I won't give the game a bad review or anything like that, just couldn't perform a mandatory technique for game progression so that is a bummer.