Welcome to our review of Hyper Light Drifter, out now on Nintendo Switch!
Drift up in a mysterious world to find a cure for a deadly illness… traverse a dark, detailed land with vicious enemies and secrets abound.
The wait is over, the worldwide acclaimed game Hyper Light Drifter is finally here with this impressive Special Edition! Runs at 60fps, includes new exclusive content and all the previously released remastered for a perfectly immersive gaming experience to play anywhere.
Explore a beautiful, vast and ruined world riddled with dangers and lost technologies. Echoes of a dark and violent past resonate throughout a savage land, steeped in treasure and blood. Hyper Light Drifter is an action adventure RPG in the vein of the best 16bit classics, with modernized mechanics and designs on a much grander scale.
I can not describe in words how much I sometimes look forward to certain titles to finally drop on a console I own. My history as a Nintendo only gamer is well-known and Hyper Light Drifter happens to be one of those games. I had friends tell me I really had to try it and now, we are at the point where it finally happened, a wish list game hit the Switch and I got to try it!
Hyper Light Drifter is a bit of a weird one. It looks like the designer was taking acid when designing the game and it just befits this game so much. It looks gorgeous despite the old school graphics, the world really reflects disaster struck and the number of cadavers makes things perfectly clear… Something very bad happened here and as you progress, the disease needs to be cured!
Hyper Light Drifter plays great, it has this perfect execution of controls and you know it is happening. With the basic sword, a shifting jump and expandability at hand, you have all the attack power you need. As you go further down the lands of Hyper Light Drifter, you will be able to upgrade but you do not really need those. I did enjoy the gun though, being able to take out enemies across ledges, it sure gave me the upper hand in some fights.
In this post-apocalyptic world, you use the shifting jump to cross ledges or dodge incoming enemies or their bullets. Each enemy has their own attack pattern so it pays off to pay very close attention to those. While at first, they may catch you off guard, it is your job to advance and find the cure for that disease going around.
There is also stuff hidden all around the place, which is something I did not like. I do not like going around every nook and cranny to see if there is some sort of secret passage in case I missed something. The lack of visibility of these really did annoy me as it often felt I was wasting my time trying to find more stuff to do.
What also got me, the lack of text. While I know this is part of the appeal of this game, a small introduction or so could have been very beneficial. Half of the time, I had to rely on the official description to really confirm there was a disease out there and you are nothing but a drifter. The following picture shows you how you are informed.
Once you get to the big map of the world, it finally becomes a little more clear what way you need to take, but it just kept feeling strange that such a great action game had such a different approach on informing those playing. This may be the appeal of the game for some, I found the lack of guidance to be overly cryptic, presented by images that not always made sense at the time of seeing them.
For me personally, the game was great but not knowing what is happening and if I am even heading in the right direction… I don’t know. I have several bits and pieces of this game that were chaotic and others that I was enjoying very much, a bit of both worlds really.
In conclusion, with everything already said, I think the main problem I am facing is actually scoring it properly. Gameplay is at least a solid 9 if not more. The lack of text is something that did set back the score for me. While it appeals to others, it puts me off instead. I just like knowing what is happening. I came down to a final score by deducting 1 full point for this and ended up with 8/10
