Like a hobo's bindle, Loot River is a ratty patchwork of incongruous ideas. Occasionally you'll glimpse snapshots of a clever gimmick—such as gambling with your healing potions to earn more of them next stage—but promising concepts are the best the game has to offer. Spending a mere hour with Loot River will reveal that it's less than half the game that it should be. It's not simply rough around the edges or in urgent need of more playtesting; Loot River is completely unrefined, like a gnarled tree trunk posing as an IKEA dining table.
Loot River's premise is distinctly alluring: a top-down action roguelite that sees you venturing through a forgotten, flooded city via sliding polyominos that you control with the right analogue stick. It blends tense combat with impromptu puzzle solving, letting you choose how and when to engage groups of enemies. You can briefly connect platforms to pull enemies one at a time, or split the battlefield in half to deal with the runts first, or blitz your way over to a block, break away, and forego combat altogether. A lot of the decision-making is left in the player's hands, which is one of the rare things Loot River gets right.
A shame that everything else is such a mess.
First up, build variety doesn't exist because the player is given nearly no choice in what to receive. Despite there being a decently-sized unlock tree for weapons, armor, and spells, there's no way to start a run with the paraphernalia of your choice. Instead, you'll either receive the default starting set or a completely randomized loadout. New gear can be found during a run, but not only is such a thing rare, but its quality is completely randomized—meaning you stumble across low level equipment even in the endgame. So expect to find one or two upgrades at best.
Shops could theoretically remedy this issue, but there are only a handful in the game—all of which offer a single randomized item at a time. It boggles the mind! There are over 50 pieces of equipment to choose from, which could have easily expanded the shop inventory to three or five items—or at least allow categorization by type (weapons, armor, spells, etc)—but Loot River simply shrugs its shoulders to such obvious solutions. Exacerbating this are the randomized shop prices, tending to land on the expensive side more often than not. So shops wind up being a complete non-factor in determining a winning run—which is a bizarre design decision for a roguelite that leans so heavily on its item pool for variety!
And that's all without getting into how rubbish the majority of your equipment actually is!
If you seek to best Loot River, you must understand one simple rule: speed is king. Big weapons might look impressive as your character drags them across the ground, but they're too unwieldy, lacking both the damage and reach needed to offset their slow attack speed. Parrying is also linked to weapon attack speed, granting quick blades nigh-invulnerable when you spam the parry button again—a tactic that works on almost every enemy in the game! And there's no drawback to it either! Loot River lacks a stamina system to punish you for spammy play, meaning you mash your way through any fight and escape those you can't by repeatedly dodging over and over again. And since bosses are the only lock-in fights, it's fairly easy to sprint to the end of the game and parry the final boss to death with your starting weapon. I tested this out a few times and got a sub-10 minute run, placing me in the top 10 for the XBOX PC leaderboards... an achievement I'm not sure I'm proud of.
There's a bit more to the combat—like a string of combos, charge attack, and spellcasting—but you won't need anything beyond the very first attack. By far the optimal strategy is to attack once and then dash behind the target, resetting your combo so you perform your opening attack again. This is because some weapons like the axe and rapier have blazingly-fast pokes that do solid damage, capable of stunlocking enemies and pounding bosses into a pulp. Better yet is if your weapon is enhanced with electricity, as it will continue to damage and paralyze enemies while you're dashing behind them—a maneuver that even keeps even the final boss fully locked down and helpless! The other enhancements (poison, fire) are hilariously useless in comparison, applying a single damage DoT (as in, one damage) that does little more than color your foe a light shade of green or orange. Seriously, if you find a lightning rapier somewhere—no matter the level quality—prepare to steamroll through the game faster than a Ferrari through a sand castle.
You may be wondering if there's any incentive for fighting enemies you can easily flee from, and my response would be "kind of". You receive both gold and experience from squashing your foes, but the former is so scant as to rarely matter (again, shops price gouge like crazy). and you only need a small amount of the latter to beat the game. When you level up you can increase one out of six of your stats, which sounds like an interesting choice—except that it isn't. What you'll end up doing nine times out of ten is increasing VIT to 13 and then, depending on the weapon you're wielding, dumping the rest into either STR or DEX. Sure, you might be tempted to spend your points elsewhere, but considering that you only net 6-8 levels before your run concludes, it's hard to beat the unstoppable combo of HP & DPS. And considering how floaty, inconsistent, and obfuscated the combat feels, you really won't want to play more than you have to. Seriously, the game needs to sit down and figure out what Hyper Light Drifter and Curse of the Dead Gods did right, because it's barely better than a Newgrounds flash game.
There are a couple more systems Loot River includes that range from curious (using run modifiers to unlock the true last boss is neat) to obnoxious (why send the player back to the hub after every stage? Why make some of the charms so ineffectual and others OP? Why does the fetid shawl drop over and over and over again?!) but I grow tired thinking about this game more than the developers clearly have. Loot River lacks common sense, too eager to blend ideas and playstyles together while doing little to make itself enticing, cohesive, or properly balanced. Its combat is messy, its equipment is boring, the money is useless, and experience is practically predetermined—but the most odious culprit is the titular loot. Loot River is not keen on doling its items out to you, and even when it stubbornly does, expect it to be hot garbage most of the time.
While playing through Loot River, I was reminded at times of the equally-strange Loop Hero... but any comparison I could draw between the two will betray how distant they are in quality. Loop Hero may fall short of its true potential, but one can walk away from it having been satisfied by the puzzle presented—or at least, tickled by its mechanics. Loot River on the other hand, is half-baked, routinely imbalanced, and—at most—mildly entertaining when it works as intended. Which is not often! Perhaps one might find it fascinating from a cautionary, post-mortem perspective, the same way that failing a midterm test can convey the importance of routine studying. As for me (and much to Loot River's chagrin) the only thing I found notable about it is that it's one of the firmest "do not recommend"s I've played in a long while.
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