I covered this game as part of my coverage of the Xbox Game Pass for May 2022

Sliding Block puzzles, Souls-Like and Rogue-Lite, that’s a lot in one game.

Loot River has a couple of interesting features. The player moves around on large block platforms that they can control with the right thumbstick while they run around with the left stick and fight. It’s a good concept but in practice, the game just doesn’t have the fluidity it needs to pull off the idea.

A major issue with Loot River is the combat will feel clunky and slow, but that’s likely on purpose. It feels like the developer took a lot of inspiration from the souls-like genre, and wanted a combat system that required purposeful attacks. Sometimes this works, but other times this just comes off as a mess. It’s the top-down view that breaks how this system is supposed to work and I almost wonder if it had a third-person view over the shoulder, this might feel better.

The real problem with Loot River is it’s a triumvirate of different ideas. If it wasn’t a sliding block puzzle, the design could focus more on the combat and arenas. If it wasn’t a souls-like game, the movement would be more fluid for the rogue-lite and sliding block puzzles. If it wasn’t a rogue-lite, the story and better-designed levels would feel better. Instead, you have randomly designed non-challenging sliding-block level design, A slow clunky souls-like combat on those sliding blocks, and a rogue-lite which means everything is randomized.

Pick this up if you haven’t had enough rouge-Lites or souls likes. If you can enjoy those two by themselves this can still be fun as there really isn’t much puzzle in the sliding blocks and it’s a novel movement system, but Rogue-Lite and Souls-Like still do feel like they’re at odds with each other. Oh well.

If you want to see the video this was taken of, or more from me on the Xbox Game Pass, check out: https://youtu.be/62CjXwS1zQg