Hyper Light Breaker runs very badly on PC and Steam Deck, but FPS improvements are coming

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 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 humble 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 time I circle back to trying it out again.

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