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I wish I could give this a "eh, it's alright" rating rather than a thumbs up or thumbs down. I like the soundtrack, aesthetic, worldbuilding, and concept far more than the execution of the actual strategy game. There's so much the game does well (mostly its music), but ultimately I had a hard time enjoying its very repetitive and grindy gameplay loop. In so many ways, I wish this game wasn't a roguelite but a pure roguelike: the grinding for progression drags the entire thing down. I often wondered if my strategy was incorrect, or if I simply hadn't grinded enough. I'm sure there are ways to do well without 30+ hrs of grinding if you know what you're doing, but good luck finding them. What's more likely is you'll probably spend a bunch of runs doing pretty much the same thing just to farm resources. And the game just isn't that fun when that's all you're doing. If every run was different and you could explore tons of varied builds while grinding, that'd be one thing, but there isn't much room for experimentation here (especially when you haven't unlocked everything).
Which is odd to say because the concept lends itself to a lot of neat ideas. You're playing an autobattler where you control the map and the equipment of your hero. Sort of like an idle game, except, well you can't really leave it idle. But so many of the tiles and choices the game gives you just aren't all that interesting? You'll first have the confusion of trying to understand the game's myriad of gameplay systems, then maybe try this or that out, only to find that most of the options it gives you aren't viable. Which leaves you with finding the rather boring optimal strategy that nearly everyone lands on (Thickets with rivers). A strategy mind you, which IS THE SAME on all 3 of the game's classes. I once heard someone remark "oh your playstyle is just like mine! I do that too!" and I wanted to scream "yeah, that's what everyone does." Once you mercilessly grind the game to a pulp, more options open up and you can do more but at that point you can beat the final boss with just about anything and it becomes more of a challenge to see how long you can last. Which is, fine, I suppose, but I don't know it feels rather cheap? How am I supposed to engage with the strategy of the game for the first 30 or so hours when I know it will all be irrelevant once I've grinded enough? Am I supposed to feel like a master strategist for trivializing the game with extreme grinding?
The loop layout is different each run, which you'd think would drastically change your playstyle, but not really. You go in with a build idea and execute it. You don't really need to improvise or think all that hard. The classes aren't even very different. The most interesting decision in the game is how bosses are spawned; the game has an ingenious mechanic where the more tiles you place, the closer you get to spawning a boss at the end of your current loop. So you have to decide whether to pace your build out or continue developing your map. Cool, awesome mechanic. Once you play the game a bunch it becomes one of the few things you're making decisions around during a run. I wish there were like 5 or 6 other ideas like this mixed into the strategy here. To be clear, I'm not asking for more complexity, as there is a lot of it here. Rather, I'd like for all that complexity to actually produce something dynamic and interesting, which with the exception of the aforementioned mechanic, and a handful of other things (finding the optimal pathing for a river was cool, not that it matters), I didn't feel it did. How you have to beat the first boss was neat, though. Wish the other 3 had you work around their design in a similarly engaging way.
There are only 4 chapters, but I'd consider the first 3 tutorials compared to the final chapter. It will take you ~12 hours to do the first 3, and probably ~20 more to do the final one. You can see the steep dropoff in the achievements ... only 3.4% of players actually beat chapter 4. I wouldn't say that's because it's particularly hard or anything, but rather that it takes a ton of grinding. I did it with all 3 characters, without guides or outside help, but honestly I'm not sure if it was worth it. I'd feel a lot more proud of it if I felt like I made some great decisions or whatever, but that's really not what happened. I think it would have certainly been less grindy and much simpler had I simply looked up strategies ... but in a game with no mechanical skill, I'm not sure the point of playing anymore had I done that. Having said that, now that my save file is fully grinded to death, it's actually quite hard to lose (to the bosses at least). So, yeah, if you grind enough everything gets trivialized very quickly.
There's a lot of obtuseness to the mechanics too; you really have no way of knowing what each stat does without looking it up, but if you do you'll end up borrowing strategies from what you read, which cheapens what is already a pretty cheapened completion, what with all the grinding. Like, how am I supposed to know "Defense" is nearly useless? "Regen per second" sounds like an incredible stat, right? Guess what, it's actually hot garbage. And for Necromancer "Skeleton Level" is the god of all stats, but "Summon Quality" matters much less? Would be great if this stuff was broken down better in-game. The fact that stats are so uneven has a knock-on effect of making the game have extreme variance. You'll play the exact same way, with the same build, and in one run you'll die on loop 6 and in the other you'll make it to loop 20. Not because you made better choices or anything, but because the items that dropped in the loop 20 run happened to have the actual important stats and not the useless ones. With the grinding, randomness, autobattling, and lack of decision making, you start to wonder if you're even the one playing, or if the game is just playing itself. This variance makes it exceptionally hard to pin down how to optimize; who's to say your last run went well because of a card you added or because you got lucky with an item or trait at a key time?
Given all that, why am I so reluctant to give this game a thumbs down? Well, because it tried. It tried really hard. The music is excellent (I know I've said this 3 times now but it's that good), the core design is rock solid and unique, the story and characters are engaging but not overbearing, and the artstyle fits the game wonderfully. Battle animations are great, with a great variety of enemies. There's a wonderful encyclopedia in-game which though its much more for lore than it is for mechanics (you'll need a wiki for that), is still well-done overall. And frankly there is something very cool about having your well-oiled loop running in harmony; the core idea is awesome and doesn't get old.
So that is all to say that I want more games like this, and I'd play their next game. There's a lot of love put into Loop Hero. I didn't connect with it much, but I applaud the effort.