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'

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.

You can read the full changelog here. From rocky beginnings Hyper Light Breaker is quickly becoming a prime example of how to handle an early access launch. Let's hope all this effort culminates in an excellent game whenever Heart Machine feels it's finished.