I played it and liked what it was doing, but I find it hard to go back to because of how simple it is. I'll probably keep dicking around with it, but I can't imagine ever finishing it.
Looove the style on display here. March of the Black Queen SNES vibes in these desolate roguelite playthroughs as grey, green and orange mold weeps over the petri dish of a screen. It's a joy to watch this diseased world slowly take form from nothing. Clicker game aesthetiqks are normally such bright cuddly things (cookie....), all in an effort to be as low mental engagement as possible - but Loop Hero is a FESTERING CORPSE and wants u to know about it.
Anyway the games alright but not my kind of thing what so ever. Far too reliant on sequential stat ups than the player's actual strategy, at the very least in these opening hours. If living, dying, and repeating with a +4% potion potency forever until you beat the next incremental boss sounds tight to you.......... go off and off and off and off!!! I'd rather have master chef on my other monitor.
Anyway the games alright but not my kind of thing what so ever. Far too reliant on sequential stat ups than the player's actual strategy, at the very least in these opening hours. If living, dying, and repeating with a +4% potion potency forever until you beat the next incremental boss sounds tight to you.......... go off and off and off and off!!! I'd rather have master chef on my other monitor.
Es fin de semana y/o trabajas desde casa. Te acabas se levantar, aún estás con la morriña, te preparas un cafelito y buscas algo a lo que jugar de forma relativamente pasiva. Te hablan de Loop Hero, lo pruebas y te destruye la vida por completo, pero eh, ¿y lo a gustito que estás con tu café y tus partiditas?
loop
Gorgeous retro pixel art that's so dark and gloomy, and pitch perfect sound effects to evoke old 80s games. I love filling in the little maps both visually and mechanically. I found it really engaging, bordering on compulsive, up until around defeating the third boss. At that point, it started to feel like I'd figured out the right combination of rivers and forests to knock the game over, but would still have to spend aaages grinding out every session, and without much new stuff left to discover! Might come back to it in future.
This review contains spoilers
There's a wonderful moment early in Loop Hero in which the mechanics click — maybe it's from a specific combination of tiles, or a certain set of cards in your deck, or the interactions between a certain class and a set of enemy types. That moment really makes the game; all its possibilities spool out in front of you, all its possible metagames revealed, and it's quite wonderful. There are lots of possible deck combinations, lots of cool interactions and strategies that appear at the intersections between different cards, and that's really where it shines (aside from its art and soundtrack, which are top notch).
The problem is that, in the late game, most of those strategies just seemed to lose all viability. Beyond requiring a fair amount of grinding (I clocked about 35 hours by the time I beat Chapter 4), the final chapter really only felt possible to me via a single strategy — which essentially amounted to 1) boosting attack speed as much as possible and 2) accelerating days/enemy spawns as quickly as possible to farm cards and items for good drops and quick map filling. Fighting the bosses on an early loop makes them beatable; however, any other method I tried over a dozen runs just proved entirely unviable. Those last several hours left a sour taste that, while not at all ruining the great times I'd had up to that point, made me question its overall balance.
The problem is that, in the late game, most of those strategies just seemed to lose all viability. Beyond requiring a fair amount of grinding (I clocked about 35 hours by the time I beat Chapter 4), the final chapter really only felt possible to me via a single strategy — which essentially amounted to 1) boosting attack speed as much as possible and 2) accelerating days/enemy spawns as quickly as possible to farm cards and items for good drops and quick map filling. Fighting the bosses on an early loop makes them beatable; however, any other method I tried over a dozen runs just proved entirely unviable. Those last several hours left a sour taste that, while not at all ruining the great times I'd had up to that point, made me question its overall balance.
Much like the premise of this game, I too am occasionally wiped of my memory and thrust into a formless void of endless recurrence.
However, in my unstoppable cycle, I keep buying roguelikes. Surely, this time I will accumulate the knowledge I need. Instead, my true self is revealed - actually, i'm impatient, lazy, and bad with memorizing details - and I am instantly killed, losing all progress and sent back to the beginning of my cycle. Hey, this roguelike has citybuilding elements! This time this will work for me!
Zach, my dear Potato, let me contribute to your metagame progress. You hate roguelikes, dude. You hate the glacial sense of progression roguelites offer, you hate the frustration of starting over with a clean state after spending hours painstakingly eking out progress, and you definitely hate the wiki-first approach needed to make any serious attempt at victory. It doesn't matter how good the roguelike is. You bounced off of Hades, my guy. It's not the play mechanics, it's not the art style, it's the difficulty and repetition!!! Break free of the samsara!!! Take the materials with you from this run and make 1/19th of the progress needed towards this permanent building awarding +1 to your next decision making roll!
(This game is a work of art and worth the money you pay for it. I just have a difficult relationship with the genre)
However, in my unstoppable cycle, I keep buying roguelikes. Surely, this time I will accumulate the knowledge I need. Instead, my true self is revealed - actually, i'm impatient, lazy, and bad with memorizing details - and I am instantly killed, losing all progress and sent back to the beginning of my cycle. Hey, this roguelike has citybuilding elements! This time this will work for me!
Zach, my dear Potato, let me contribute to your metagame progress. You hate roguelikes, dude. You hate the glacial sense of progression roguelites offer, you hate the frustration of starting over with a clean state after spending hours painstakingly eking out progress, and you definitely hate the wiki-first approach needed to make any serious attempt at victory. It doesn't matter how good the roguelike is. You bounced off of Hades, my guy. It's not the play mechanics, it's not the art style, it's the difficulty and repetition!!! Break free of the samsara!!! Take the materials with you from this run and make 1/19th of the progress needed towards this permanent building awarding +1 to your next decision making roll!
(This game is a work of art and worth the money you pay for it. I just have a difficult relationship with the genre)
it's a cute single player autobattler that i thought maybe would have something more to it. i got it solely on the merits of the aesthetic and it gave me the aesthetic and nothing else. one of those games made actively worse by having any writing at all
the orgasm denial of video games.
addiciton
"Bueno, tras pasarme las tres fases de este roguelike, estoy bastante contento. Tiene un gameplay bastante bien medido, aleatoriedad interesante, es original y..."
"El nivel final son los tres jefes finales y otro más súper poderoso. Tienes menos tiempo para prepararte para cada uno."
"Bueno, vamos a dejar el juego aparcado mientras me gustaba."
"El nivel final son los tres jefes finales y otro más súper poderoso. Tienes menos tiempo para prepararte para cada uno."
"Bueno, vamos a dejar el juego aparcado mientras me gustaba."
This is one of those games that I'm going to play for a long time, something I will never complete, but will never abandon. Beautifully simple, gracefully complex.
This game's experience is what I call a "semi-active strategy idler" that is intriguing in the starting hours but gets dull as time passes.
It's fine? I felt like I figured out the optimal solution too fast and it takes a generous amount of time to finish a run.
the best game to play during work meetings
Loop Hero is conflicting for me. It takes a ton of mechanics from similar genera and mashes them together in unique ways. This is rad game design and feels like the final form of a dope game jam project. However I feel like I am not being rewarded for progression beyond little percentage based increases and I don't have complete agency.
It's great that you can play this game as background work and it's pretty low input. And while I did spend a solid 10 hours non stop looping -- I knew that more time would not lead to more enjoyment and I had to pull myself away.
It's great that you can play this game as background work and it's pretty low input. And while I did spend a solid 10 hours non stop looping -- I knew that more time would not lead to more enjoyment and I had to pull myself away.
This game is 40% vibes, and 60% farming Orbs of Expansion from Vampire Mansions
Süchtigmachendes Indiegame mit interessantem Konzept.
Ich hätte mir etwas mehr Spieltiefe gewünscht (nach nem halben Tag hat man eigentlich schon alle Gebäude gebaut)
Auch ein schnelleres Tempo wäre schön gewesen, man schaut meist ja wirklich nur zu.
Aber die Idee ist absolut erfrischend und alles bringt einen ein Stück weiter, daher für Grinder ne Empfehlung.
Ich hätte mir etwas mehr Spieltiefe gewünscht (nach nem halben Tag hat man eigentlich schon alle Gebäude gebaut)
Auch ein schnelleres Tempo wäre schön gewesen, man schaut meist ja wirklich nur zu.
Aber die Idee ist absolut erfrischend und alles bringt einen ein Stück weiter, daher für Grinder ne Empfehlung.
El juego mola pero de verdad que los roguelite me cansan y este lo ha conseguido muy rápido
One of my biggest surprises of 2021. I didn't realize I needed a cathode juiced card management rpg, until I tried their demo which was the perfect amount of time to get hooked on it's meta. Bonus star for being the perfect game to play on voice calls.
Honestly surprised how little I enjoyed this after people were raving about how unique and innovative it was to the rogue like genre. Honestly nothing in there that I haven't seen before. The main mechanic I assume they're talking about is that you build the "dungeon" that the character automatically runs through rather than the usual other way round. Trouble is that other games have done this better where the gameplay is still actually fun, rather than mindless. The narrative and world is cool, has really nice ideas there and the gloomy art style fits very nicely into that but honestly I spent all of the time playing waiting for the gameplay to get good. About as engaging as a cookie clicker game.
The best piece of design is there is the combos between the tiles creating new tiles and if they'd focused on that more than I'd have enjoyed the game as that would've been really fresh, but as it is, coming up with that mechanic and then only using it for a small amount of cards is a tragic waste of a good idea.
On the roguelike range between "Can beat the game first try" and " have to grind loads of runs to have a chance of beating the game" where the sweet spot is in the middle, Loop Hero is right at the grindy end, expecting you to do run after run of the same boring gameplay for a chance of getting the resource you need to upgrade your base.
The best piece of design is there is the combos between the tiles creating new tiles and if they'd focused on that more than I'd have enjoyed the game as that would've been really fresh, but as it is, coming up with that mechanic and then only using it for a small amount of cards is a tragic waste of a good idea.
On the roguelike range between "Can beat the game first try" and " have to grind loads of runs to have a chance of beating the game" where the sweet spot is in the middle, Loop Hero is right at the grindy end, expecting you to do run after run of the same boring gameplay for a chance of getting the resource you need to upgrade your base.
Esta muy guapo
I kinda fell off the wagon before the end but I enjoyed my time with it immensely
Really solid roguelike where you create the world the main character traverses through. Place tiles around the loop to enhance the main character and decide what you fight before reaching the boss in each stage. Incredible pixel art on the character portraits that outshines even Blasphemous, Loop Hero is a real treat.
I've never played a game like this before. Really unique, really well made.
I rarely like card based games, but it hits that dopamine that games like Runescape hit for me, a fun game that I can pick up and play for a few hours and be extremely happy with for a week.
The title is very literal, so you know this is a roguelike game. It can be hard to understand some mechanics, stats and else but the more you play, the more you learn and enjoy every bit of loop. You'll spend hours playing, managing the base, learning about the history, enemies, stats, farming resources ... Just to start a new play to see if you are able to get to the end.
You can decide to leave the loop whenever you want to get all the resources collected through the play or you can be more greedy and risk almost everything to beat the boss. But even if you die, you'll get some resources so you can keep advancing outside the gameplay.
The art it's also outstanding.
If you get into it, this will be a very satisfying game for those who loves the genre.
You can decide to leave the loop whenever you want to get all the resources collected through the play or you can be more greedy and risk almost everything to beat the boss. But even if you die, you'll get some resources so you can keep advancing outside the gameplay.
The art it's also outstanding.
If you get into it, this will be a very satisfying game for those who loves the genre.
Drug
A very interesting roguelike. Simple, complicated and challenging at the same time, the gameplay feels great and beautifully connected to the story premise, where the "hero" must "loop" around and rebuild a destroyed to nothingness world via his memories, which are the cards you place at the road. Managing the different cards and enemies, when it's not obvious what helps you and what doesn't constitutes a fresh challenge and makes the idle-battler part of the game strangely enthralling. Different classes that are actually very unsimilar and build variety are also well done (even though there's a class that's most obviously broken) and the tile interaction is, honestly, pretty genius. Making different landmarks and fulfilling the different enemy spawn conditions is interesting and makes sense with the compelling worldbuilding. Also there's a great pokedex-type book ingame where you can read all about the world and I love it.
Artistically, the soundtrack is VERY good, the artstyle is 10/10 for me with very pretty spritework and fascinating enemy designs. (and every single one has mugshots!) It's clear as day the amount of passion that went into it.
It's definitely a challenging game, although googling can help you if you're in a bind (I didn't personally do it and don't really recommend it, but I see how missing some stuff can destroy you). Also, it's a roguelike, but there's an end to it, and I personally don't see a motive to replay it like you would Slay the Spire for example.
Why the -0.5★ then? Well, sometimes it was stressing in a way that I do not enjoy, has some farming (even though it's temporary and still engaging) and it kinda has some hiccups at the ending. But, as a package? An absolute little bundle of passion, it makes me joyous that it exists. Let's go indie gamers (from Russia this time!) If you can see yourself having fun with the gameplay, absolutely give it a shot.
Artistically, the soundtrack is VERY good, the artstyle is 10/10 for me with very pretty spritework and fascinating enemy designs. (and every single one has mugshots!) It's clear as day the amount of passion that went into it.
It's definitely a challenging game, although googling can help you if you're in a bind (I didn't personally do it and don't really recommend it, but I see how missing some stuff can destroy you). Also, it's a roguelike, but there's an end to it, and I personally don't see a motive to replay it like you would Slay the Spire for example.
Why the -0.5★ then? Well, sometimes it was stressing in a way that I do not enjoy, has some farming (even though it's temporary and still engaging) and it kinda has some hiccups at the ending. But, as a package? An absolute little bundle of passion, it makes me joyous that it exists. Let's go indie gamers (from Russia this time!) If you can see yourself having fun with the gameplay, absolutely give it a shot.
i hate roguelikes