Loop Hero is a really neat roguelike that has you automatically loop around a track, fighting monsters, collecting gear and items and placing cards around the map to create forests, villages, deserts and rivers, all in order to help - and sometimes hinder - your hero get strong enough to defeat the boss of the level. With a really interesting art style, good music and some nice progression elements, I really enjoyed what I played of Loop Hero even if my interest for the game fell off near the end and I couldn’t get past the last bumps in difficulty.
The core of the “loops” are quite simple, you start on an empty track where only slimes can spawn and you let your hero walk automatically. By defeating these monsters, which is also an automatic process, you get cards from your deck that you can place on the map and you can also get item to equip. Items have a multitude of stats which depend on the class you are playing, and they can cater to many build styles. Cards do a bunch of things, but they usually add new monsters which spawn at a fixed rate based on the time moving forward as you fight and act. Monsters have a wide range of skills and attacks, and you learn what they do and how to counter them along the way.
Placing certain cards next to other produces special results, as does placing multiples of a certain card. Adding a bunch of rocks on the map might increase your maximum health, but it also will create a mountain, and spawn goblin camps around. Vampire mansions will transform villages into destroyed ruins, and so forth. This is really fun and you’re incentivized to play around and test various combinations of cards and tiles until you get to the end of the game where you either know exactly how you can focus on certain aspects of your character and use the right cards, or you’re having a somewhat bad time.
Whenever you move over special tiles or defeat certain enemies you’ll get materials that you can use in your camp afterwards. If you exit your current run at the campsite tile, you’ll get everything you just picked up. If you exit at any other point, you’ll lose some items, if you die during your run you’ll still exit with a few materials, so you’re always somehow progressing. In your camp you build structures that improve the stats of your characters, unlock new gameplay features - such as classes, being able to level up, etc. - or new cards for your deck.
This works as a good system to allow the player to unlock new features and cards over time, but after a while it ground to a halt for me, getting the specific materials I needed for any upgrade took me many runs and then I unlocked the alchemy feature that allowed me to transmute materials into others and that kinda broke this system entirely. I managed to unlock everything else right then and there and it was way less satisfying than using my hard-earned resources. You have items you can hold in the campground, and they provide a big variety of bonuses. I’m not sure if they are somehow the key of getting your character even stronger, but acquiring them is so random that I couldn’t really tell if they were the way to go.
After a while you gain the ability to level up by defeating monsters, which gives you special abilities you can choose from a random list of three. They really can make our break your runs, with certain abilities being really powerful and others being too situational or just plain bad, so things can go a bit frustrating if you get into a bad run where the two or three passive skills you really want aren’t offered to you. The three classes - Warrior, Rogue and Necromancer - are different enough, but a little more variety would’ve been nice.
As you place cards during your loops, a boss bar increases and a boss spawns when it’s full. Each level has a specific boss and they have their gimmicks that might surprise you the first time you encounter them. For instance, a boss protected by mirrors that regenerate couldn’t really be defeated by a slow-but-powerful character. Everything, from enemies to special encounters to bosses has a lot of style and heart, and this gives this game a special feel.
I got to the last (?) level, but couldn’t get really far in it. I had built most of the campground, but some features seemed still locked - two equipment spots, for one - and I didn’t know how to get stronger to really attempt that level with better odds, so I stopped. Loop Hero is really good and I had a great time with it, I wish I could’ve finished it but I couldn’t see how long that would take, so that got me to lose interest. I highly recommend it to RPG fans!
