Loop Hero

If you never understood the "idle game" idea and how people could "watch a game play itself", Loop Hero might be the best possible introduction to how this concept actually works and where it's depth of gameplay lies. While it got all the dark fantasy tropes we came to love in place it completely shifts the gameplay from a tactical RPG with basic strategy base building to a world builder, where you control the world in order to level your hero and your hero follows a simple path, burning all their cooldowns. And if you overdo it your hero dies and you only get a small part of the loot of your journey. You could also call it a reverse tower defense, where instead of building towers to defeat a continuous swarm of enemies, you build tiles to level and challange your hero. Each stage is one map on one screen and it only starts with a camp and a path that builds the name giving loop. And with a deck of tiles you can later on customize, you build a world around and on that path to buff your hero, give them challanges and ultimately defeat enough enemies to have the boss spawn in. After defeating the boss you can return victorious or continue playing the map until you filled it with tiles completely. But that "bonus mode" will get extremely hard, very fast. It gets increasingly complex in it's normal mode, too, while never really becomming obscure or unfair. The overall progression is done in a rogue-lite pattern, where if you win or lose you end up in your base, which is growing too, and you can build buildings, gain more villagers, etc. The most important skill as a player is resource management, focusing on a build and giving your loop a rhythm of buffs and challanges your hero won't succumb to. To me and most people i know who played it it's insanely addictive and thus highly recommended to anyone fond of the fantasy, strategy and RPG genres overall.

I haven't played a whole lot of Loop Hero. Or, at least I don't think I have. It feels like I've played it for quite a while. In absolute terms, it's probably around the 10-ish hour mark. Relatively, it feels like I'm still at the exhausting end of the grind curve. Every piece of progress I've earned has come excruciatingly slowly, and has largely not been the result of conscious decisions I've made. I think I understand the mechanics, and am using them effectively. It felt like my understanding has not lead to greater success, and my practice has not accelerated the process. From none of my losses (some quite close) have I been able to figure out a specific problem with how I played the game, and the inescapable conclusion was that it was luck. And not even bad luck! It would have required many rare events to happen in a row in order to have achieved victory! Maybe I'm just missing something here. It's possible that there's some technique to placing down cards, or setting up the cards you can see during an expedition, that I've fundamentally misunderstood. My suspicion is that I haven't, and that I'm simply expected to endure many, many more hours of grind before things start to feel rewarding. The game has multiple different resources that you can acquire over your various runs. Each resource feels interchangeable, and the rate at which you acquire them is largely down to the luck of the draw. Grinding for certain buildings and keeping certain cards in your deck can put your thumb on the scales, but essentially you are just waiting for 6 or so arbitrary numbers to grow high enough so you can build your next building. It might take you 3 or 4 runs to do so, and it will make you that tiny bit stronger, so you can grind another 3 or 4 runs for an even more expensive building. I do appreciate when a game tries to be a little different, but this game just didn't work for me. I'm sure I'll abandon it when the next roguelike comes along.

The game is critically flawed. It rewards you for building a few simple patterns, and punishes you for exploring by placing tiles exploratively. The grind is huge, and placing exploratively expands it. The pool of tile combos is ankle deep, and the story nearly non existent as the lands. Your character has 3 item slots or so, and at most two times that many items you may find for each slot. Once you know what your doing with such shallow operating pools, its nearly impossible to lose. Knowing takes about 4 games. And they are not fun or entertaining games, but rather rounds learning what makes an area unlivable, and how to heal. A game where exploration is not necessary, and is punished with grind extension. A grind in a game that plays itself in a world that's steps are countable and circular.

You will see almost everything this game has to offer over the few couple of hours. You will know 90% of mechanics, read 90% of dialogue and in general see most of its content. Yet you'll have another 20 hours of grind ahead of you.

Having sank maybe 6-8 hours into Loop Hero, the main thought I've had is that if I had gotten it free I probably would have quit after the first few hours - I'd cleared the first act, but the game was still really opaque. It was only the fact that I'd just dropped $9 for it (most of my holiday budget) that made me more invested to sort out what I was missing. There is some good design here, but it's hidden behind a pretty rough user interface even for some pretty basic gameplay details. Some things have mouseover and some don't - and because almost everything in the game involves some trade-off, it can be really hard to tell what should be a top priority and what should be cast aside, or even just the simple reality that you shouldn't play every card and that you want them to pile up and discard wasn't clear, at least to me. It's easily possible to clear Act I and have no idea what you really need to be focusing on to actually make headway. I think it is rewarding and good play, but I think you do really have to make a time commitment to research, reach that point where the game's complexities are even visible, and then sort out how you want to strategize in light of them. Is this a very good game? Yes - the glowing reviews aren't wrong. Is this going to be a very good game for everyone? Def no I think the core trouble is that it's going to be hard early on to know which camp you fall into because the game's outward face is pretty rough. If you can invest the time/energy not to just to keep playing, but also to research all the systems and mechanics the game conceals, then I think it is a game a lot of people here would like, but a) it's not for everybody, and b) it does require that investment imo. While every game has a learning curve, this is one I think it's hard to improve your skill/understanding even just to moderate level much less to mastery just by playing it.