As I begin this review, I’m struggling to avoid loop puns and figures of speech, but I keep coming back to them. Everything about this game loops, from its protagonist’s circular path to the cycle of expeditions and unlocks. And unfortunately, that loop keeps bringing me back to the issues I have with the game.
What is Loop Hero? It is a story of a hero in a forgotten realm, restoring the world piece by piece by wandering a circuit and building up the world around him. Practically, this means the hero follows a path, fighting enemies and picking up loot, and the player uses that loot to build locations on and around the path.
Building up the hero and the landscape is exciting, and there are tons of interactions to unlock. Place mountains together to form a tremendous peak. Have a vampire take over a village to form a vampire lord’s keep. Send beacons to light the way, curse forests with bloody foliage, and form the foes the hero will fight.
It is all a balancing act. If you place too few locales or don’t get enough out of them, the number of loops will rise and the hero won’t have the skills to deal with them. Place too many locales and the hero might be overwhelmed, or worse, the ultimate evil might appear before the hero is ready! Between different class skills, upgrades, deck builds, loadouts, and equipment combinations, there should be enough choice to make every run exciting.
But there just… isn’t.
I’m addicted to Loop Hero. Even now I want to try another run. Here’s how that run will go: I will run the game at max speed. I will build the combinations I know to build, and maybe discover one new combination. I’ll pick equipment as I obtain it. Eventually, the game balance will even out, and I’ll try to choose when to push forward and advance the run.
The run will last a while, and half of that time will be almost the same experience as what I’ve done before. Build another mountain. Drain another treasury. Light another path. At the end of the run, I might unlock one or two new equipment, and perhaps one more environmental card. Then it’s off to the next run.
It is not enough variety. I have performed likely around nine expeditions, and have unlocked about six new cards, one new class, and four buildings. This sounds like a good amount, but they don’t impact the game enough. The current runs feel much like the first one did for much of the run. The progression is enough to keep me going, but not enough to satisfy.
Loop Hero is a fun game to pick up for a run every once in a while, but perhaps is not a great game to binge. The disappointment at the end of a run where nothing interesting was unlocked is difficult to deal with. Each run doesn’t offer enough variety of gameplay or skillful manipulation for the excitement of the (frankly genius) concept to hold me.
And yet I want to run the game again now. The extra environs in the above image look amazing to play with. These roguelites are going to kill me.
Verdict: 5 hours played? How!?
Kyle Adams 