Loop Hero

The Good -Loop Hero looks great and the sound design is decent enough. I was very impressed with art design. The Bad -I don't play idle-games/clickers, so I don't know if this is just par for the course for this type of game, but Loop Hero's actual gameplay elements are incredibly boring and grind intensive. There is very little player skill or strategy involved. -Game promotes a very safe and passive play-style since character power is strongly influenced by building additions to the campsite, which are expensive and you lose a ton of resources if you get ko'd while on an expedition. You're better off just retreating and playing it safe for the most part, which is bad since each expedition feels too much like the last. -The campsite UI is weird and finicky compared to the rest of the game's UI. -Using cards to create combos feels cool at first but not enough is done with it. Conclusion -Loop Hero is fine if you want to play a good-looking grindy game with minimal player input. Look elsewhere if you're looking for some kind of strategic or tactical thinking.

I already completed this game on Steam. It has amazing art and music, the dialogues are quite fun to read, and the game actually provides story context to everything which is happening gameplay-wise. Definitely do not skip dialogues. In contrast to most other games, here you manage the environment around the character, while the character itself moves and fights automatically. You job is to pick the right gear for your chosen class and build, as well as place tiles with various buildings/terrain types to construct the level. As time passes, all enemies including the bosses get stronger, so you must find a blanace of putting enough enemies on the map so that the character gets enough xp and gear for killing them, but not enough to actually overwhelm and kill you, this is where the challenge comes from. You also must pick correct enemies, as different classes have their own strengths and weaknesses vs various enemy types. In addition to this, you also select various permanent buffs before the level starts in form of cards, the selection of which grows as you progress further into the game, as well as choose a variety of items the will benefit your class/build. Between the combat runs you spend the resources on upgrading your camp, which unlocks new classes/abilities/items/cards/etc. One downside the game has is that somewhere in the middle it can become a grind to upgrade the camp, as you might not get enough resources from your runs, but this generally gets solved as time passes. Other than that, the game is excellent!

The game starts out really fun when you are learning about interactions between tiles and figuring out how to build your loop in a way that scales rewards quickly enough, but no so quickly the enemies outscale your hero. Once you've found a working setup though, there is little reason to change it and gameplay no longer meaningfully changes anymore for that hero. The number of cards is also fairly limited and some of them are just always bad. It took me 18 hours to beat the final boss and unlock every card/building. The only thing left to do is to beat it with the other two heroes, but after that I don't see any reason to replay it. For the price I still reccommend it though and had fun with it while it lasted.

The concept of the game is that you loop in pre-determined circuit that changes due to the map and the terrain placements the player adds. It takes a little getting used to it, but once you do it's easy to understand and play around with it. It's interesting and fun for around 2 to 3 hours but it really gets repetitive afterwards. There are upgrades and changes, but due to how the core game logic works it's more or less the same and after some time you get tired of it. The pixelated graphics are also an issue. Some people like it, but I felt it degraded the overall experience. They could have just added cartoonish graphics and it would been much better, The pixelated graphics gives a cheap feeling to the overall experiene, but your mileage may vary depending on how much you like or not pixelated graphics. Overall it's a nice experiene, albeit with a short life circle. It's not that expensive and if you get it on sale it's probably worth it's money. But it's a kind of game you will play for some time and never came back to again.

Foremost, this is a good, fun game that has already taken up hours of my life as I go from run to run. It's also got got a couple issues too. Conceptually, it's one of those games where you don't control your character exactly, but control the circumstances around them and watch them go - a la Gratuitous Space Battles, something I've always enjoyed. In this game, what the player does is use cards to create the hero's environment, which changes what lies in their way as they go around a loop, getting persistent buffs from buildings. This hits two poles: roguelike/rpg, and god/builder, and is tightly made at its core. Each card you can add to the world ups challenge, adding perks but also making things harder - some even combining into new ideas. As a fan of both, it works well. There is a downside, though, as after a couple hours and one or two camp upgrades in, the player may notice that the ability to alter the world in a progressive way abruptly slows to a crawl. The game very quickly stoppers progress and gets grind: few of the new buildings for a while (or the cards that come with them) significantly affect the game world. Card combinations dry up quickly. Base resources trickle in, and some require the player to keep cards that don't mesh with newer ones to get. Enemies don't typically drop resources (upping other problems), and - most problematic of all - making stronger enemies tends to just give you more rolls on the RNG rather than affecting what you get, so there often isn't a reward for making things more challenging. Thus, you can make the game harder, but can't much affect how you progress or positively affect future runs. There are other classes, but after putting hours in each they feel more like hardmode trials than different ways to play. All in all it's still great, don't get me wrong, but it'll be a while before it builds on what it promises - in a game where building new things is the point - and this makes it less great than it could be.