Hyper Light Breaker is a pretty darn neat game, even if it does have all the usual roughness of an Early Access release, but its Steam Deck performanc?e was ??practically inexcusable on launch day. Somewhat unexpectedly, the developer Heart Ma??chine has already managed to turn that around, how??ever!

Heart Machine made a name for itself with the original Hyper Light Drifter, a practically legendary top-down hack 'n' slash indie adventure that sets the stage for Breaker. Seeing Hyper Light Drifter release in Early Access the way it did made me slightly worried about what the future might hold, but Hotfix v0.5.1.107947 has thankfully dispelled many of my concerns. Specifically, shoddy performance remains one of Breaker's biggest problems, but?? I am thrilled to report that the game is no longer unplayable on the ?Steam Deck. The flip side of the coin is that there's some serious weirdness with how Heart Machine handles the Deck in general.

You can now enjoy Hyper Light Breaker on the Steam Deck, but there's still some strangeness about

I am thrilled that Hyper Light Breaker runs reasonably well on the Deck. The gameplay loop is a perfect match for the console, and the new hotfix's performance improvements have already made for a genuinely enjoyable experience. Heart Machine has already promised more optimization to come, and soon: "The strongest feedback we’ve received this week focuses on performance, particularly on lower-end machines and the Steam Deck. Today’s Hotfix includes a large number of performance improvements and improved Graphics Settings. Expect even more improvements in future ??planned updates as well."

I didn't anticipate the difference between the graphics settings a Steam Deck has access to and those you have on a regular PC setup. In my previous article, I mentioned that Hyper Light Breaker only lets you tweak three different settings:

• Shadow quality
• Foliage distance
• Prop detail

The new hotfix changed that on the Steam Deck, bu??t not necessarily for the better. On the Deck, you no??w only have access to:

• Ambient occlusion
• Film effects
• Film grain
• Chromatic aberration

That's right: the three original settings have been taken out of the graphics sub-menu and replaced with a handful of entirely different ones instead. Why is that the case? I do not know, but it gets weirder still. You see, the regular PC build of Hyper Light Breaker has what I?? would call a proper graph??ics tweak menu:

It's still far from perfect, but it's genuinely helpful and allows you to tweak? the visual experience however you see fit. There's no real way to do so on the Steam Deck at this time, and I cannot fathom why this would be the case unless there's something very painfully obvious that I keep missing.

My gut feeling is that Heart Machine is trying to deliver a curated, optimized experience on the Steam Deck. This is fair, and an approach that's more than valid for what is at its core a very low-spec gaming laptop. Yet, I do not see the value in only giving Steam Deck ?users a gutted version of the PC build's graphics settings, no matter how I flip it.

Another ??possibility is that the Steam Deck's options UI is somehow squeezed together and only displays a small portion of the full settings list. Since only the four bottom options show up on the Deck, that's a distinctively realistic option but a problem nonetheless.

This whole realization has sort of overshadowed Heart Machine's hotfixing efforts for me personally, though I'm sure the team will eventually get around to resolving this apparent problem in due time. Otherwise, Hyper Light Breaker is proving to be rather good overall, and I can finally recommend it. Even on the Steam?? Deck, as long as you're okay with not being able to tweak settings however you want!

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You will get hurt as you venture through the Overgrown on your quest to defeat the Crowns in Hyper Light Breaker. You will get hurt a lot. If you want to survive long enough to reap the best r?ewards of your excursions, you'll want to learn how to hea?l.

How to make Medkits in Hyper Light Breaker

Using a Medkit is one of the most reliable ways to heal yourself in Hyper Light Drifter. Unfortunately, you don't start your first run with any, which made t??hings pretty awkward for me when I tried to heal after I got out of a tough fight. To get a Medkit, you first need to find a Golden Ration.

Golden Rations are the materials you use to access the vendors in the Cursed Outpost, and you'll need at least one of them to get a Medkit. So far, I've found two ways to get Golden Rations. The first is by exploring the Overgrown and finding them in golden chests. Golden chests seem to spawn near areas where Prisms spawn, or at least they have for me. You'll need a certain amount of ?Bright Blood to open t?he chests, so make sure you have some before you look for one.

You can also get Golden Rations whenever you reset your Cycle. You're allowed t??o reset your current Cycle whenever you run out of Rezs. Pherus Bit grades for your performance whenever you reset your Cycle, and if you score high enough to go up a Rank, he gives you a Golden Ration.

Once you've got a Golden Ration, you can bring it?? to Pherus Bit in the Cursed Outpost and use it to get a Medkit. You'll start with two Medkits, but you can upgrade your stash to hold more if you use more Golden Rations. Whenever you want to use a Medkit, hit the C key.

How to use Medigems in Hyper Light Breaker

Once you use a Medkit, there are two ways to get more of replenish the?m. T?he first is by harvesting Medigems. These green plant heals you a little whenever you pick them up, and you can also use them to refill a used Medkit. You need five Medigems to re-fill a Medkit, which you can do when you find a Shrine while you're exploring the Overgrown.

The locations of Shrines are marked on your map w??hen you load a new version of the Overgrowth and are easy to interact with. All you have to do is walk up to them and hold the F key to interact with them. Just make sure there aren't any enemies around; they will NOT hang back and wait for you to sort through your menu.

How to perfect parry in Hyper Light Breaker

The last and most dangerous way to heal yourself in Hyper Light Breaker is by performing a perfect parry. Enemies hit hard in Hyper Light Breaker, and they like to gang up on you, so I'd only recommend do??ing a perfect parry once you've whittled the herd down a bit.

To pull off a perfect parry, hit the Q button rig?ht before an enemy hits you. Not only does this heal you, but it also seems to reflect projectiles back at enemies. It's risky, but it might save your life if y?ou're out of Medkits and can't dash away from a persistent enemy.

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Hyper Light Breaker offers a wide array of weapons, and selecting ?the correct option will be extremely important to make the best build.

Not only can you access different weapons inside the game, but you can also upgrade them as you keep developing your characters. Even though Hyper Light Breaker is a roguelike, the system of unlocking your armaments is slightly different than what ?you might expect. Here's how it wo?rks.

How to get new weapons in Hyper Light Breaker

If you want?? to increase the options in your armory, explore the Overgrowths.?? Along the way, you will find new weapons by tracking down the sword or pistol-shaped icons.

If you track the first icon, you'll come across different melee weapons. These are commonly referred to as Blades and offer precise methods of?? taking down an enemy from up close. If you track down the pistol icon, you'll come across Rails, which are ranged weapons and allow you?? to do damage from a distance.

Once you find a weapon in Overgrowth, send it straight to your stash. To do so, press the Cache button, and you can equip it for your next run.

If you're looking for new starting weapons, unlocking Breakers is a good choice. By acquiring them from the merchants, you can also have more options for starting gear. The Blades merchant will be available by default, and the Rails merchant can be accessed after you repair his shop. Both will offer you limited stock, but the available options switch with tim?e.

How to upgrade weapons in Hyper Light Breaker

Once you have selected a weapon you want to upgrade, go to the merchants in the Outpost. You'll have to first unlock the Upgrade feature by incr?easing your affinity with the merchant?s. You'll need Golden Rations for this task, and it can be found by either resetting cycles or exploring the map. You won't be getting too many of these resources, so make sure to use them with care.

The post How to unlock new weapons in Hyper Light Breaker appeared first on Destructoid.

Hyper Light Breaker sure looks neat, right? Well, that neatness comes at a steep, steep performance cost, as the game is extremely hard to run. The apparent lack of performance optimization? isn't the only problem, either, as the game doesn't even have a proper graphics settings menu to begin with.

I really do hate to rag on the developer Heart Machine for this, but the fact of the matter is that Hyper Light Breaker hasn't gotten off on the right foot. On top of its "Mixed" review rating on Steam, I can attest to it being totally unplayable on the Steam Deck. Even at the absolute lowest settings, Valve's handheld can barely eke out an unstable 15-30 FPS. This is particularly disappointing because Heart Machine specifically mentioned back in December that Hyper Light Breaker should run well on the Deck on launch-day. Obviously, that claim hasn't panned out, but Heart Machine is on the case already.

Hyper Light Breaker's performance is bad, but you can at least enable V-Sync right now

The fact that Hyper Light Breaker runs much the same as a bag of cement powder is just one-half of the equation, as I alluded to earlier. For some reason, the game's selection of graphics settings is beyond small. As of the Early Access release build, you can tweak a grand total of three settings:

• Shadow quality
• Foliage distance
• Prop detail

On that note, it's definitely worth pointing out that I've been having trouble figuring out?? what, exactly, is changing as I modify settings from one stage to the other outside of shadow quality. Putting shadow quality onto anything above "0" obliterates the ??Steam Deck frame rate further still, which is fun. You can also change the rendering resolution of the game and whether it runs full-screen or not, but frame-pacing is off no matter what you do since there's no way to enable V-Sync in-game. Fun stuff.

Heart Machine's solution is thankfully simple, just slap the following code into Steam's launch options sub?-menu: "-ExecCmds="r.??vsync 1"".

For everyone who's trying to play Hyper Light Breaker on faster machines than the admittedly h?umble Steam Deck, Heart Machine invites you to share your dxdiag for them to assess, so they are on the case already, which is a good sign.

Granted, Hyper Light Breaker is an Early Access title that's just come out of its shell. I do understand that Heart Machine is likely struggling to keep up with all the feedback the community is definitely sending their way, of course. It's also possible that the build that got shipped is lacking some of the optimizations that Heart Machine intended to ship, as per their Steam Deck performance assessments. Even so, it's sad to see Hyper Light Breaker fumble this hard.

As a big fan of Hyper Light Drifter, I was really excited to see what might come of this project. Its performance so far has put me off, so I'm hoping that Heart Machine clears this up by the tim??e?? I circle back to trying it out again.

The post Hyper Light Breaker runs very badly on PC and Steam Deck, but FPS im??provements are coming appeared first on Destructoid.