Loop Hero does things that I like but overall doesn't do enough to keep me interested for the playtime it seems to expect. Loop Hero is strange in that it's an idle game that wants to be an base-building, deck-building, tower defense roguelite RPG. (Yes, those are all in the game.) You do missions for the purpose of grinding base-building materials. Building things in your base provides new tiles to put in your deck, new character class options, things like that. The "deckbuilding" works in the sense that across a standard run you draw tiles that you can place to affect that given loop's terrain, such as villages that provide healing (but spawn bandits), mountains that increase your max HP as you place them down in the distance, things that increase your walk speed while you're near them, etc. There's some strategy here in terms of whether you want to prioritize tiles that put you in danger for better equipment or whether you'd prefer things that give more materials, but I personally found myself using one setup on every run without much issue, only changing it when I get new things to play with. With all this tile placement and equipment upgrading while in a run, Loop Hero expects you to provide player input reasonably often, and not only that, but it often requires at least some semblance of thought in terms of positioning of tiles and even more thought in terms of choosing between two pieces of equipment of the same rough value when they provide different passive bonuses. In this regard I'd say it does a poor job at actually being an idle game, because you really can't go for more than a few seconds without the game needing your input for something. The game does have settings for automatic pauses, so it's not merciless in this regard. However, this stream of choices is the only real gameplay that occurs during the loop, making it still rather dull to play if you don't have anything else going on. Full disclosure, idle games aren't usually my cup of tea anyways, so I could be off base. I got this for free of Epic and just decided to check it out, and since I had a boring class this semester, this game ended up being played for about 2 hours a week for a couple months, which is more time than I would've given it outside of this circumstances. The only reason I'm considering this game finished (dropped) is that the class is out and I don't see myself returning to this now that I'm likely able to use my time on engaging things.
And honestly, despite all my words about how this game is a messy conglomeration of genres that doesn't know what it wants to be, it's still playable and fun. The sole issue I have with the game is that it's way too grindy. For a game with gameplay as simple-yet-demanding as this, it goes on for an extremely long time. Grinding materials takes forever even when you're not dying in runs, and if you are dying in runs, it just takes even longer because the game severely punishes you for dying or even for retreating while not at your campfire (the loop point). The simplicity of the gameplay means that you end up doing the exact same activity for a very long period of time, which would be fine if this was just something that runs in your background for you to check in on now and then, but since it requires continuous engagement to play this game, it just feels like you're doing busywork for about 30-40 hours. Great if, for example, you have an extremely boring remote job where you need to look awake but do barely any actual work, but otherwise I would consider something that's either more idle or more engaging.