Hyper Light Drifter Part 1
0I think maybe I set my expectation a little too high for this game. When all you hear about a game is high praise it's hard not to expect something ground breaking and earth shattering. I was met with an adequate game that actually could have been truly amazing with some more tweaks here and there. What we have is a really fun action adventure game that takes some really strong influences from a few genres and games, the least not being the Zelda franchise. The combat takes a little getting used and is fairly tactical. The only issue with that is the game loves to throw a ton of enemies at you in small arenas. Your character isn't super snappy and doesn't respond super fast so there is a ton of panic movement and attacking. You have no i-frames whatsoever to speak of and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but can be very punishing. If an enemy can knock you down and there are others around you are almost guaranteed to die. The enemies will murder you as you lie there before you can get up and move. You also can get destroyed pretty quickly if you get ganged up on, which is pretty easy. The best way is to kite enemies around and peck and poke your way to victory though that strategy isn't always a viable option. What made me really realize the weaknesses to the combat and controls were the optional combat arenas. They truly are punishing, but really bring to light how slow the combat responds. The arenas felt way more luck based than skill and that is not something admirable. Though after spending the better part of 6 hours in them I honestly felt I could take anything on in the game and easily skated my way to the end. With snappier attacks and dodges the game really could have been something special. I feel that it falls short in this regard. Another issue I ran into was the dash into projectiles upgrade worked sporadically and made dodging around and through projectiles a real gamble. The graphics and the world are very nice and I loved exploring and digging around for secrets. It tried to find everything, but after realizing what some of the stuff was locked behind I knew there was no way I was getting everything. I did find all of the tablets and keys, there was no way I could get all of the outfits. One outfit is locked behind a tech I couldn't get a great hold of. You need to dash over 800 times and there was no way I was achieving that. I'm just not good or patient enough. I did manage to get over 100 though and that felt like a victory to me. There really aren't puzzles per se, just platforming and battle challenges, some of which offer some real skill checks. The bosses are a ton of fun to figure out as well and some kicked my ass pretty hard. I'm looking at that first bird boss. The final boss was a breeze and a little disappointing, but still pretty cool. The story was presented in an interesting way, but felt like trying to put hieroglyphics together. It seemed to be dealing with facing sickness and your own mortality but outside of that I have nothing. It's not an easy thing to do to tell a story with sparse visual indicators. It certainly embraces the minimal story style. I do enjoy the fact that you can purchase upgrades for your dash, your sword and your guns. It also seemed like your outfits had some sort of passive effects, but I couldn't tell what the few I tried on did outside of some extra gore. I have a lot to say about this game which does mean I did enjoy my time with it and I am being harsh because I do see something special in this game, I just wish the developer spent a bit more time refining combat. Enjoy my blind playthrough.
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