I never once got a piece of gear so cool that it made me change the plan I had going in and build around it.That, and the only thing about loot is stats, stats, and more stats. Does your Warrior want to buff his automatic health regen or his vampirism to gain health with every strike? What stats will your Necromancer sacrifice for the ability to summon an additional skeleton into their posse of the dead? You’re often swapping out one sword or magic ring for a shiny new one, but this is where Loop Hero leans too hard into randomness: If you don’t get the weapon drop you need for a couple of loops you're just out of luck as your damage doesn't keep up. The loot that drops in battle is a big part of what keeps you busy: while it’s fairly robotic early on, you soon have to stop and think about which stats are best for your class. (Which you can change, thankfully, to something easier on the eyes or dyslexic friendly.) That said, the muted palette isn't going to be to everyone's tastes, nor is the chunky pixel font all of the text and stats appear in. Watching the map go from blank slate to overwhelming collage is a rewarding sense of progression that at least somewhat makes up for the lack of customization in your character. I found the balancing act between adding useful tiles and not overwhelming my hero with new enemies to be one of the best challenges in Loop Hero. Beasts inhabit the woods, vampires come down from their castles, skeletons roam the graveyards, fishmen emerge from rivers, and gargoyles fly in and land just about anywhere. The balancing act is between adding useful tiles and not overwhelming the hero with new enemies.However, along with the benefits that those tiles bring (largely minor things like boosts to attack speed for forests or a town that restores some HP when your hero passes through) come corresponding tradeoffs. As your hero fights they earn cards representing map tiles among their other loot, and the conceit is that placing these tiles makes the hero “remember” that features like forest groves, mountains, villages, rivers, and more were actually part of the world all along, restoring them to reality. So for the first few uneventful loops, well, it's a good time to fill your water glass or grab some snacks in the kitchen.īut Loop Hero soon gets you occupied and challenged – and this is where the ability to pause between battles becomes essential. This even goes for boss battles: it’s very strictly your stats vs theirs. Once you're in a fight your fate is controlled by your and your enemies' Attack Speed, Defense, and Damage stats, with a dash of whether or not the percentage chance gods give you more Crits, Counters, and Evades than the other side. In those first few minutes you won't do much, quite literally, as battles are hands-off. The correspondingly retro music's good, too, even if a few tracks play a bit too often for the couple dozen hours Loop Hero will likely take you to play through. The art in fights is more detailed, showing 8-bit warriors slugging it out with basic attack animations, though like a 1990 RPG the sprites don't vary with changes in weapon or as enemies level up. It’s inhabited only by your hero – little more than a 4-bit blob of white pixels – and a handful of bouncing green bubbles representing basic slime blob enemies. This is the most excellently surreal apocalyptic fantasy setting since Dark Souls.The map is represented with charmingly simple pixel graphics for the loop itself, which begins as a featureless, angular path through the lonely darkness. The conversations and unlockable tidbits of lore are wonderfully meandering oddities. You have strange, dreamlike conversations with the people and creatures you meet, from bandits unsure why they're stealing to goblins who have somehow remembered themselves right into existence. Everything is forgotten except, of course, your lone hero, who walks a circular path through the void, fighting monsters and - crucially - remembering things before coming back to a campfire to rest.
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