Loop Hero - Thoughts

Loop Hero is a novel concept that struggles to "wow" the player beyond its drawing board. You're not likely to notice it during your first dozen hours or so, where everything is new, exciting, and strange. Unfamiliarity will usher in intrigue, the sense of discovery propelling you onward as the next upgrade, tile, and unlock is just around the corner. In that sense, I think Loop Hero succeeds in being a worthwhile experience with plenty of highs to look forward to—but its foundation is shaky, its philosophy confused, and its mechanics drunkenly slapped together. It's a beautiful game full of conflicting bits and frustrating design choices, leaving a bitter aftertaste only because it shows so much potential.

It's important to emphasize how utterly ingenious Loop Hero is—especially in a genre overflowing with imitators. Roguelites often fit snugly into "X-like" categories (eg "Isaac-likes, Spire-likes), but Loop Hero skirts all comparisons and mimicry. It's a bizarre amalgam of ideas: base building, auto battling, tile laying, hand management, and crunchy RPG equipment juggling. You get a little bit of everything, from loadout tinkering to permanent progression, from reliable strategies to RNG-derived wins. There's likely something here to tickle your fancy, as well as a gameplay concept you haven't encountered before—or at least, not in the peculiar way Loop Hero handles it.

On top of all that, Loop Hero's aesthetics are downright unmatched. The pixelated art style captures the world's bleakness better than its stilted writing ever could, with easily readable tile design and phenomenal color composition. The character portraits in particular are wonderfully rendered, with each friend and foe being as wildly strange as they are hauntingly beautiful. Complementing the carefully crafted visuals is a chiptune soundtrack that slaps so hard that you'll have to check your ears for bruises afterwards. It's impossible to name a favorite tune—pick any track out of the expansive OST and you'll get toe-tapping beats, chill jams and moody meditations. But where Loop Hero goes its hardest is in its boss-appearance themes, tossing the player into some of the most exceptional, hype-inducing headbangs to rouse your anticipation of the upcoming boss fight perfectly. I can't commend Deceiver and blinch enough for their positively phenomenal work

So if everything about Loop Hero stands out, where does it fall apart? The answer to that will require some digging...

... or rather, some constructing.

The base building system in Loop Hero is terrible in just about every conceivable way. While promising at the onset, you'll soon realize it's an elaborate front for unlocking new tiles. The placement of your shantytown is largely nebulous; only farms and lumber mills benefit from adjacency bonuses, but both are straight-up sunk costs, requiring way more resources to construct than they'll ever produce (seriously, you're giving me stable branches?!) In fact, a lot of the upgrades come across as the developers tossing crumbs at the player: 1% potion heals, garbage starting equipment, +30 max HP, and needless supply cap increases. Building upgrades are arbitrarily assigned (no upgrades for the warehouse and alchemist, but five for the watchtower?) and you're not likely to even notice this feature without the "?" tooltip on. Perhaps worst of all is that the intel center—a useful catalogue of everything seen and unlocked in the game—can only be built halfway through the campaign, forcing the player to learn much of the game's inner-workings on their own.

Exacerbating this problem are the game's numerous currencies, making it hard to parse what you need and where to get it. The resources start off simple enough—wood, stone, food, and metal—but they soon spiral into a grocery list of metaphysical concepts—evolution orbs, unity orbs, expansion orbs, and more. Each of these also come with their own fragmented version, complete with a different name and icon from their parent, just so you'll have to deal with nonsense equations like how 10 time shards form an astral orb or 20 noticeable changes form a metamorphosis. Loop Hero's intention is to encourage variety and experimentation (eg fight slimes for resource X, skeletons for resource Y), but the player doesn't know where these goods come from until they unlock the intel center! And by then, the player is two upgrades away from discovering alchemy, allowing them to transmogrify one resource into another—completely bypassing the need to diversify your tiles!

And this is a real problem for Loop Hero because the game's tiles are an imbalanced, chaotic mess that push you to play favorites.

Every tile comes with its upside and downside, the upside usually being a buff or reliable enemy spawn, and the downside being a... well, an enemy. It's a smart way to ensure that the player has to be cautious and temperate with their tile placement, lest their road becomes one long monster crossing. But some tiles are categorically inferior to others: swamps are terrible, sands are terrible, chrono crystals and bookeries are better off being other tiles, and temporal beacons aren't worth the obnoxious watcher fights. Meanwhile the forest, blood grove, oblivion, and village tiles (with complementary vampire mansion) are so essential that you won't ever entertain a run without them. Sure, occasionally you'll flirt with an outpost or storm temple, but the benefits provided by the "good" tiles will have you crawling back to your original deck before day's end, no matter which class you start as. The impressively dubbed "gold tiles" also suffer the same fate, with the arsenal tile being the only reliable pick of the lot (the necromancer and crypt can synergize, but once the HP-gain kicks into high gear you're already unkillable anyway).

Battles are my last point of contention, though I admit a big part of it is that auto-battlers simply aren't for me. Loop Hero's bestiary has a shocking amount of depth and diversity woven into it—the sheer number of status effects puts most RPGs to shame—but that ultimately means very little in regards to gameplay. Whether an enemy can poison you, or buff its allies, or shields itself matters not, as you have no control over your character's actions during battle (besides donning and doffing equipment, which you'll very rarely do). You can influence the pace at which monsters spawn outside of battle, but the dominant tactic by far is to open the flood gates. Gear is only acquired from routing enemies, with better gear dropping from stronger opponents—so you'll want to toss as many aggressive foes at your tiny patrolman as possible. Not only that, but certain monsters (like blood golems and vampire lords) provide categorically better loot than their peers, further differentiating the good tiles from the bad. I think if the player was given limited abilities they could activate per run, or one-time-use items, or even the option to manually activate their own healing potions, I would've been at least engaged in most of the combat, rather than browsing the internet on my second monitor.

I didn't realize until writing this entry just how much Loop Hero and Vampire Survivors have in common. While the promise of progression serves as their main hook, most of my enjoyment was wrung out of discovering the optimal strategy for both games. These titles aren't like Dead Cells or Hades, where a successful run leaves you giddy to toy with a new weapon or perk path; once you figure out how to properly "play" these games, all that's left to do is sit back and let your kill count skyrocket. But whereas Vampire Survivors succeeds in being a clever little diversion, Loop Hero displays a lot more potential—and thus, falls from a greater height. It's worth a playing to experience just how unique of a game it is, but Loop Hero is less of a diamond in the rough and more of a... murky gemstone.

It's pretty, but sadly undercooked.