Loop Hero Review (Mystic Exarch)
I wanted to like this game a lot because of the retro fantasy aesthetic. The idea of building the world around you and having these realistic interactions that affect stats/gameplay is fascinating and definitely got me hyped in my early hours. There is some pretty great world building to go along with this too, and I love the dialogues because they help set all that up.
Where the game falls apart for me is in the actual rouge-like elements. Specifically in how repetitive it gets so quickly. I found myself doing the same things over and over again, getting bored of using the same cards and builds because it was what worked without much feeling of forward progress.
For example, the only class that I've been able to complete runs with any degree of regularity is the warrior. Despite unlocking two other classes, it just seems way more powerful, reliable, and easy to use. Maybe there are cards I would have been able to get later on that work better with the rogue and necromancer, but I don't really know that for sure because you can't view specific details about the tech tree unlocks later down the line.
Perhaps I might be able to see that one of the next buildings I can build unlocks the "forest" card. Great, what does it do? Does it synergize with one of the other classes somehow? Don't know. I don't even know how to unlock that building, because the game shows me little symbols without names or tooltips for the resources needed to unlock it. I've never seen those symbols before though and they don't seem to correspond to any of the types of resources I've been picking up. None of my cards are capable of making a resource with that symbol and I don't even know what that symbol means because I can't scroll over it to view a tooltip of some kind telling me how I can get it. Even when I spend a lot of hours grinding to unlock a building that supposedly allows me to trade books to unlock codex entries, all it does is unlock flavor text for already discovered things, not new information.
The opaqueness of these mechanics really kills my motivation to make forward progress because I'm bored of doing the same thing for 10 hours and I have no idea when its going to get better. It also sucks loosing a run, and therefore a bunch of resources, because you suddenly died. Without being able to control the battles directly, the only control you have is in what cards you place, what gear you equip, and what talents you take. But all of that is subject to both RNG (in terms of what you get) and also varies wildly in balance. Some cards/stats/talents are total garbage while others are auto-takes.
There just isn't enough variety, and a lot of these systems are pretty shallow. Like you're just getting +7% more attack speed or something most of the time. It doesn't make decisions interesting and tactical. Like obviously I'm going to take +7% attack speed over +5% attack speed every time. Its very Diablo-esque in that its about scaling your numbers to get bigger without really making very interesting moment-to-moment decisions. For example, maybe I could get an item that adds possibility of lightning damage to my weapon, and also a talent that says whenever I deal lightning damage, it stuns the enemy for 1 second. An environmental card effect could then say stunned enemies take extra damage or something. This is how you do synergy in an interesting way, but its more complex to implement, and it feels like the developers kinda just didn't want to do all that.
I think what they wanted to make was an idle mobile game where you really don't do much and don't have much control over anything, because that's what this game is. Its repetitive and the RPG systems are very shallow, even for an RPG lite. It has painfully slow progression and a major lack of variety.
If you like an endless grind of collecting random resources because I said so and making numbers bigger then this game might be interesting for you, but I like something with more depth. And sure, maybe it gets better later, but I've already played 10 hours. I beat a boss and I'm just bored now because the prospect of doing it all over again with the same setup but harder just isn't appealing to me.