The visual design and music are stunning. The elegant, expressive animation makes fighting and traversing the world a joy. There’s a lot to love about Hyper Light Drifter. If not, you’ll almost certainly give up after a few hours. If you’re the type of gamer who has the fortitude to try things over and over until you master them, Hyper Light Drifter is for you.
Ultimately, how you respond to these difficulty spikes will depend on your temperament. Regular enemies are tough enough, but when you’re fighting groups of them on top of a boss unleashing waves of increasingly savage attacks, it becomes a real test of endurance. This is a game where enduring persistent failure is the only way to get good, and a lot of people won’t have the patience to get through some of its more gruelling battles-particularly the fiendishly difficult boss fights. You have to leave and scour the overworld for more, or somehow scrape through the next room, which is probably teeming with powerful enemies, with a dribble of HP. If you’re deep in a dungeon and run out of health items, bad luck. But you also find yourself repeating areas, which is when frustration sets in. These sections present an enjoyable challenge, and there’s a satisfaction in dancing around a room and killing everything without taking a hit. For example, kill one enemy and a wall that was providing cover from a sniper on the other side of the room will suddenly disappear. Something as essential as the keys to understanding the story shouldn’t be hidden behind so much busywork.Dungeons hide the most satisfying combat in the game, and their layouts change dynamically around you, forcing you to constantly change your tactics. At their worst, you’re required to throw yourself against each and every wall just to alleviate the anxiety you might miss a hidden opening, or path of proximity triggered, invisible platforms. At their best we’re given a clue, like a ledge that seemingly has no other purpose, and keen observation is rewarded. While this genre has a long and proud history of secrets hidden in this fashion, and I did enjoy them at first, the way these story fragments are frustratingly stashed in each of the world’s four regions became increasingly annoying. What few direct answers do exist are trapped inside monoliths hidden in secret coves and behind locked doors.
#HYPER LIGHT DRIFTER REVIEW ZERO PUNCTUATION SERIES#
Again, I can’t really be sure how it all fits together exactly, because though I have my theories, they’re just interpretations of a stylish, intriguing series of events and images that never fully makes good on its grand setting. “I gathered bits and pieces of the story: an apocalypse, an illness, time travel, and a mysterious dog all play a part. For me, all this reinforced the idea of drifting through time and space because for a large part of Hyper Light Drifter I was grasping for a handhold as to what the hell was going on. Its repeating, dreamlike cutscenes are cryptic. Interacting with an NPC conveys information in storyboard-like sequences. Its storytelling is a wordless experience that requires interpretation.
It takes a commendable risk with its bold storytelling that intrigues, but doesn’t fully pay off in the end. And while I wouldn’t consider Hyper Light Drifter overly hard – I was able to defeat most bosses on my first or second encounter, with the exception of two disproportionately difficult ones – I would also shy away from calling it a style-over-substance kind of experience. But most impressively, they’re all optional – to the point where you can finish Hyper Light Drifter’s roughly seven-hour campaign without purchasing any upgrades at all, if you’ve got the raw skill to pull it off. That adds flavor to the combat systems without overcomplicating things. “With the exception of a grenade ability, these upgrades don’t introduce completely new mechanics, but instead only add interesting elements to your beginning skills.
0 kommentar(er)
