Rarely have I gone through such a roller coaster of opinions on a game. I have been waiting for dozens of hours to talk about this game, waiting until I beat it, which... took me many, many attempts. I like to think of myself as smart enough, but this game made me feel like an idiot. Let me tell you about it.
Let's start with the undeniably good. The indie market may be oversaturated with pixel art, but Loop Hero contains some of the best of such stylings I've ever seen in a game. The sprites you'll see for the majority of gameplay are necessarily simple, but the artistry and design of the character portraits and story depictions (although there aren't many of the latter) are astonishing. Add to that some VERY good music, and this game's artistic qualities are simply top-notch: dark, sparse and minimalistic to set the mood, and hitting hard with spectacular detail where needed. It's to the extent that I'd recommend checking the game out for a while, even if you end up dropping it, just to get a taste of this aesthetic. It's haunting.
The story follows an outline that most gamers will have seen before - the humble human against cosmic forces bent on destruction - but it's done well and told with care and compassion. It's a tale of scraping by in a world that cries out for you to give in to nihilism, and literally crafting meaning from the shreds of purpose you're given, and that's the kind of story I can get behind time and time again.
So, the gameplay. The basic gameplay loop (har har) I found to be as addicting as it was often incredibly frustrating. When I first heard about this game upon its release, I didn't look too deeply into it, but thought it was mostly an idle game: set things up, let it run for a while, check back in on things, and so on. I picked it up recently thinking it would make for a good thing to play while multitasking. What I learned is that while this game builds off of idle game elements, and the combat and movement is hands-off, success requires constant micromanagement. Building out the world, updating your equipment, making sure you adopt certain traits soon enough to take full advantage of them- even just having to manually restart every loop. In earlier chapters, yes, if you're just grinding for resources, you can survive for a while by setting things up and then letting the game play out for a couple minutes while you look away. In later chapters you will want to constantly pause the action to build and manage, then unpause to progress, and there is hardly anything idle about it besides the combat.
If you just let the game run too much without micro-managing, you will die. And that's not the end of the world. But you will have lost the vast majority of the resources you gained on a given expedition- and this is a bad feeling. You have wasted a significant amount of time. Knowing when to bail on an attempt, so that you can go back to the camp and start building up cross-run benefits, is as important a part of the game as trying to beat the bosses. That said, while grinding will benefit you to an extent, any improvements beyond unlocking new cards for your deck are generally very small and build up agonizingly slowly.
This is a roguelite, but it's less about rolling with what's given to you on radically different runs, and more about learning how the game works, how cards synergize with each other, and what overall strategies are tenable for each class. To put it a different way: it's less about reacting on the fly, and more about solving an overall puzzle. Because of this, I unfortunately feel that there's little replay value once you've beaten it. You can always try different classes and strategies, but it's not like the game itself is going to feel like a radically different experience.
The game tends to take a "YOU figure it out" approach to explaining its mechanics and how map tiles can interact. On the one hand, figuring some of this stuff out on your own can be immensely satisfying. On the other, it can be hard to tell if you're just getting unlucky or are on the totally wrong track. I reached a high point of frustration with this game where it seemed like nothing I tried allowed me to get anywhere near the final boss. It was then that I started looking up strategies online, something I normally dislike doing as I'm stubborn and try to figure things out for myself. Seeing other people's builds, from minmaxing efficiency to things that seemed unbelievably impressive or just silly, renewed my appreciation for the game and the elegance of its systems. It really is one where you'll benefit from checking out videos, reddit or wikis- something I should have done sooner.
In the end, my final victory was a mix of both evolving my strategy and getting lucky; getting the traits I needed early enough in a run for them to be of immense use (there are various RNG rewards in this game that will either be near useless or overpowered, depending when in the run you have the chance to take them).
To sum it up: Loop Hero is a game of outstanding aesthetic value and mixed gameplay satisfaction- it often feels grindy and samey, but when everything comes together just right, you can stand back and look at the world you've created with pride.
Let's start with the undeniably good. The indie market may be oversaturated with pixel art, but Loop Hero contains some of the best of such stylings I've ever seen in a game. The sprites you'll see for the majority of gameplay are necessarily simple, but the artistry and design of the character portraits and story depictions (although there aren't many of the latter) are astonishing. Add to that some VERY good music, and this game's artistic qualities are simply top-notch: dark, sparse and minimalistic to set the mood, and hitting hard with spectacular detail where needed. It's to the extent that I'd recommend checking the game out for a while, even if you end up dropping it, just to get a taste of this aesthetic. It's haunting.
The story follows an outline that most gamers will have seen before - the humble human against cosmic forces bent on destruction - but it's done well and told with care and compassion. It's a tale of scraping by in a world that cries out for you to give in to nihilism, and literally crafting meaning from the shreds of purpose you're given, and that's the kind of story I can get behind time and time again.
So, the gameplay. The basic gameplay loop (har har) I found to be as addicting as it was often incredibly frustrating. When I first heard about this game upon its release, I didn't look too deeply into it, but thought it was mostly an idle game: set things up, let it run for a while, check back in on things, and so on. I picked it up recently thinking it would make for a good thing to play while multitasking. What I learned is that while this game builds off of idle game elements, and the combat and movement is hands-off, success requires constant micromanagement. Building out the world, updating your equipment, making sure you adopt certain traits soon enough to take full advantage of them- even just having to manually restart every loop. In earlier chapters, yes, if you're just grinding for resources, you can survive for a while by setting things up and then letting the game play out for a couple minutes while you look away. In later chapters you will want to constantly pause the action to build and manage, then unpause to progress, and there is hardly anything idle about it besides the combat.
If you just let the game run too much without micro-managing, you will die. And that's not the end of the world. But you will have lost the vast majority of the resources you gained on a given expedition- and this is a bad feeling. You have wasted a significant amount of time. Knowing when to bail on an attempt, so that you can go back to the camp and start building up cross-run benefits, is as important a part of the game as trying to beat the bosses. That said, while grinding will benefit you to an extent, any improvements beyond unlocking new cards for your deck are generally very small and build up agonizingly slowly.
This is a roguelite, but it's less about rolling with what's given to you on radically different runs, and more about learning how the game works, how cards synergize with each other, and what overall strategies are tenable for each class. To put it a different way: it's less about reacting on the fly, and more about solving an overall puzzle. Because of this, I unfortunately feel that there's little replay value once you've beaten it. You can always try different classes and strategies, but it's not like the game itself is going to feel like a radically different experience.
The game tends to take a "YOU figure it out" approach to explaining its mechanics and how map tiles can interact. On the one hand, figuring some of this stuff out on your own can be immensely satisfying. On the other, it can be hard to tell if you're just getting unlucky or are on the totally wrong track. I reached a high point of frustration with this game where it seemed like nothing I tried allowed me to get anywhere near the final boss. It was then that I started looking up strategies online, something I normally dislike doing as I'm stubborn and try to figure things out for myself. Seeing other people's builds, from minmaxing efficiency to things that seemed unbelievably impressive or just silly, renewed my appreciation for the game and the elegance of its systems. It really is one where you'll benefit from checking out videos, reddit or wikis- something I should have done sooner.
In the end, my final victory was a mix of both evolving my strategy and getting lucky; getting the traits I needed early enough in a run for them to be of immense use (there are various RNG rewards in this game that will either be near useless or overpowered, depending when in the run you have the chance to take them).
To sum it up: Loop Hero is a game of outstanding aesthetic value and mixed gameplay satisfaction- it often feels grindy and samey, but when everything comes together just right, you can stand back and look at the world you've created with pride.