A month into early access, Hyper Light Breaker has already added a new playable character, with a perk designed for players who like to 'shoot fast and shoot a lot'

Three hyper light breaker characters running toward camera viewed from below. — (Image credit: Heart Machine)

Hyper Light Breaker may not have enjoyed the smoothest early access launch, but developer Heart Machine has been diligent in listening to feedback and striving to update the game since its initial release last month. The studio issued numerous hotfixes in the wake of launch, addressing players' most grievous complaints, and provided a more thorough roadmap of its future plans for the action roguelike last week. Now, it has debuted the first "monthly update" for the game, which among other things introduces a whole new playable character.

According to the update's patch notes, this new character is called 'Ravona' and can be unlocked on the character selection screen. Like most characters, Ravona comes with two different 'SyComs'—floating robots that aid her in combat—which players can choose between when entering the fray. The 'Reaper' SyCom is a "high-risk, high-reward" perk which has "high damage potential for both rails and blades". Meanwhile, Ravona's 'Ranger' SyCom is apparently designed "for Breakers who want to shoot fast and shoot a lot", which speaks to me on a deep and intimate level.

Alongside Ravona, the update adds three new weapon 'affixes', all of which increase damage to targets afflicted by specific conditions like rot, burn, and stagger, as well as two new enemies, a "bullet leaper" variant and a "croc brute" elite. Coupled with these additions are some significant adjustments to play, with Heart Machine rebalancing the "danger meter" so that it now "triggers less regularly but drops more powerful compositions with more waves" and tunes "attack magnetism" to prioritise enemies in front of you (presumably so you get ambushed from behind less).

The most significant change outside of adding Ravona, however, is a surgical overhaul of the parry mechanic. The parry's unreliable, hard-to-read nature was one of the most common complaints among players on launch. In response, Heart Machine has adjusted its design in several ways. There's a new visual effect to demonstrate that the parry is omni-directional, (i.e. it will parry an attack regardless of where the enemy is attacking you from). Moreover, parrying one enemy now interrupts attacks of all nearby enemies, with a perfect parry increasing the duration of the interruption.

These major changes are accompanied by a much longer list of balance tweaks, specific bugfixes, and performance optimisations, the latter of which was another sticking point for the community. To address performance issues, enemy spawns have been capped so the game will no longer buckle your GPU by overloading it with critters, while Heart Machine has also fixed several jarring camera hitches and improved level-of-detail transitions for "a large number" of environmental assets, which should make the game smoother and reduce pop-in.

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Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.