Loop Hero Review (Technocosm)
I think this is probably the biggest love/hate relationship I have ever had with a game...
I usually don't like doing this, but this is a case where I feel I should give this game the thumbs down, despite the fact I do play and... sort of enjoy this game - mostly to balance out the fact it's already currently very positively received.
To try to put my very conflicted feelings towards this game in as few words as possible, my issue with this game is that it is an amazing and unique idea in theory - but when you actually sit down and play the game it's very dull, repetitive, and slow paced. You'll still find some enjoyment from the pure satisfaction of growing a little bit stronger with each run every time, but honestly, I think the flaw I cannot get past with this game is the absurdly grindy nature of it.
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| GRINDING
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The most fun part of this game is just the satisfaction you get from making progress, but the progression is slower than most microtransaction-ridden mobile games, which is especially confusing for a game that doesn't even have microtransactions. It would often take about 8-10 full runs each lasting around half an hour just to get ONE more damn building, and ultimately after all that effort, the benefits would often be as trivial as "oh, now your health potions heal 7% of your health instead of 6%". I can only guess the developers were worried the game isn't long enough? It technically does only have 4 "levels" (unless there's some secret post-game content I'm not aware of), but I honestly feel this would have been much better off as a short and replayable experience, than the absolute slog it is right now to inflate the playtime required to beat it.
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| RESOURCES
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Beyond the grinding being ridiculously tedious, every resource in the game required to make any permanent progress has its own special conditions for acquiring them. This is a fine idea, and most resources are obtained through reasonable enough methods - defeat these kinds of enemies to get this, walk through these kinds of tiles to get that - that sort of thing. One very important material needed for most buildings and upgrades in the game though, are orbs of expansion, and the game never tells you how to get them. I checked the encyclopedia and found that no enemies or tiles in the game would give you them, and when looking at the material itself it told me all I had to do was fight multiple enemies at once to obtain it. I then proceeded to do about 5 runs spamming as many enemies as possible into single fights, and at the end of all of them I had gotten 0 orbs of expansion. That's because the limit to the amount of enemies on a tile is 4, and to get orbs of expansion you need to fight groups of 5 enemies (game says 4 works, but I never got one orb from 4-enemy fights, and even with 5 you only have a % chance of getting ONE orb). So how the hell does that work? You have to get a tile with 4 enemies, and then have a nearby building which has some sort of gimmick to add enemies onto an already existing fight to get the fifth enemy. I had to look up guides to figure this out, and even once I started using the best strategy the community had found for grinding these orbs, it still took hours just to get enough for the tiniest of incremental upgrades. This is both extremely unintuitive to figure out, and extremely unfun to do - but you need those incremental upgrades to have a chance at the later boss fights, so get grinding.
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| GAMEPLAY
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I like the idea that because you are building the world, you control the enemies that spawn, the resources you'll earn, and to some extent the equipment you'll get throughout a run - however, other than that, the game plays itself entirely. No targetting options for attacks, no movesets for your character, and not even any activated abilities - I can understand maybe wanting the battles to go mostly automatically, but I'm honestly kind of baffled that as far as I've played, this game just doesn't have any way to interact with a battle as it is happening at all.
Of course, the equipment you choose over the course of a run, and the cards you build your Deck with are going to have an effect on the outcome of your battles, but if say you realise "oh I'm a little low on health, and before the next loop I have one more big fight coming up" you genuinely can't do anything most of the time but just watch your character walk blindly into their death. Health potions? You're not allowed to use them manually, the game decides when to use them automatically. Activate some kind of ability to help you? As I said, you don't get any, the only effects you get in this game are passives or one-time use abilities that trigger automatically when the game decides. Play a Card in your Hand? What are you going to play? The vast majority of cards have little to no impact on their own, and also often take a long period of time to give their benefits. The only Card in the entire game that can really save you there I have seen is Oblivion, the one that just deletes everything including enemies on a tile - but you can only get so many of those.
It feels like most runs of this game are just rolling the dice, seeing if the game randomly decides to give you the equipment you need to win this game, and if not - tough luck, go again for the 783rd attempt of doing the exact same thing. It feels to me that for the point in the game I'm at, the only viable strategies are:
1. Attack speed spam with Rogue until you kill so fast nothing gets a chance to hit you (I went infinite twice with this strategy, but you gotta get lucky with equipment for it to work, unfortunately)
2. Attack speed spam with Necromancer to summon a ludicrous amount of skeletons (more consistent, but less likely to scale well into late-game in my experience)
And while these strategies were fun at first, it feels like they're the only strategies in the game that really work even over 50 hours into it. Every time I've thought of trying out a different Deck, the new Deck has been vastly inferior to those 2 Decks, so every game ends up being the same. If I was at least progressing at a reasonable rate, I may have been able to stomach that, but that's just it - I'm not progressing at reasonable rate. I'm spending hours and hours just to get 1% bonuses to certain stats and it just feels like... Why am I playing this game anymore?
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| CONCLUSION
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I realised that I spent more of my time playing this game feeling bored or frustrated with all the grinding than actually enjoying it, but that I kept pushing through that for a long time because the initial idea had captivated me so much that I felt like I couldn't write this game off until I'd completed it. I kept thinking this will get better soon, I kept thinking I'll probably like it by the end - and maybe I still will, I still plan to at least finish this game at some point, but I'm no longer in a rush to do it. Taking a moment to step back and realise that I have now spent over 50 hours on this game, and that I only really enjoyed the first 5 or so hours of that, and spent the rest of those hours pushing through because "surely it gets better, right?" has really put in perspective for me why I think I have to give this game the thumbs down despite how much I love the concept - and despite how much I want this to be good.
All that being said, I did say I don't think this is an outright bad game, and believe it or not, I do still stand by that - I just think if you want to play this game to completion, you have to go into it with a certain mindset to enjoy it. Since every run drags on for so long while you have very little control over the outcome of it, this game is much more enjoyable as a sort of "background game" to play while listening to something else or just trying to unwind while doing something to keep you a little busy.