Loop Hero - Preview

When I first saw the trailer for Loop Hero, I honestly didn't know what in the world I was going to get into if I played this game, was it a card builder, was it an endless runner, you know what was going on? The trailer never made it clear but after one loop through the game, well things aren't much clearer but I have an idea.

A lot of the game revolves around telling the Storey the more you play it so for obvious reasons I'm not going to go into any of it here except to say that the world has fallen into darkness and once you lose sight of an object you lose all recollection of that object. The opening loop has you just wandering around, trying to find out what is going on, but when you give up and return to your base, you will find that some items have remained. As you venture back out into the loops, you will find materials that you can use to build up your base, which in turn grant you more effects in the loops, it is a nice and satisfying mechanic.

The strangest part of the entire game is that it is basically plays itself, from movement to combat, you have no direct control and it took me a bit to get used to that. I really wasn’t sure what to expect when the game said that, because deck building is not my forte when it comes to games, but I wanted to give it a go anyway. Thing is I didn't really delve into it too much because I didn't need to and all that comes down to how I was playing the game I think, and obviously it's going to be different for everyone but for me just never seemed to be big part of the experience.

As I mentioned before, when you're back at your base you can upgrade and install new options and doing so usually rewards you with a new tile, that you can then use when exploring the loop. There can only be a set number of tiles that you take with you, with the expectation that you look at the pros and cons for each one in order to truly find a collection that suits your playstyle. As I said I didn't really worry about that because I was just enjoying the loop and that's not to say that in future I might change my mind and spend hours ensuring I've got the perfect setup for myself but at the moment it just didn't feel like that was something I needed to focus on.

One thing that I did need to focus on was the day cycle of the game, regardless of what you're doing when you're moving, either in combat or just exploring, time is always passing and as it passes a metre at the top of the screen fills up once it's full, a new day dawns. At the start of every day enemies will respawn and depending on the number of days that have passed, extra effects may take place on the board. It's actually quite a unique thing because there were some tiles that could generate one enemy every two days and depending on the length of the loop I found myself sometimes having to face two or three enemies depending on how often the days ticked by.

As you're facing off against these enemies, again through a completely automated battle system, when you defeat them you earn gear for yourself but also tiles that you can place down on the map. Some of these tiles can just be simple like meadows of grass, which when placed down will give you a slight HP boost or some might be little mountains, but if you place nine mountains down in a grid that becomes a large mountain and bolsters your HP even greater. The catch with the mountains though is that once you have a large mountain harpies will descend from it and fly to random place on the map, and if that wasn't enough every 10 mountain or rock tiles you place down spawns a goblin camp. Not to mention there are Woods, Cemetery, Battlefields and more that can greatly impact the number of enemies that can spawn on the nearby tiles.

It's not all about enemy spawn though, you can find tiles that can help you, the Blood Forest will ensnare enemies if their health falls down below 15%, you just have to make sure your health stays above that because it will grab you as well. Graveyards will spawn treasure chests every day which can give you some pretty sweet loot, but the area that they impact may also turn enemies that die in its range, into the ghosts. So for every action you take there is potentially a bonus for you in items or health and a consequence in enemies or the removal of a bonus and having to think about that to ensure you're getting the right balance as critical.

Now it's not all rainbows and sunshine for the game at this point it's still being developed and there are issues to be had, like the font is meant to be in an 8-bit font and it suits the game but it's really hard to read especially when you're trying to determine the level of armour pieces on a tiny little square. Not being able to know if what I was looking at was a level 8 or level 9 piece of armour or if the bonus damage is high or low compared to what you're wearing it's a challenge. The other issue is that unless you're actively planning something and once you spent the time planning and you hit play you can pretty much leave the game alone, I'm not kidding when I say that there were times when I let it loop and walked away, which is perhaps not the greatest of things you can say about a game. I would love to see them allow you to select which enemy you can attack first, just some sort of battle interaction would be great, because right now, you can just watch and hope things go in your favour.

Loop Hero is an easy game to get into but a hard game to invest it, so far it seems to just be a constant loop of planning and waiting and I'm hoping that once the story expands more and more information is given things will change, but right now everything feels a little out of whack. The other issue that I have so far is with the text it is just too hard to read, and it's not because it's blurry or anything like that it's just the wrong type of font for the type of game it is, I mean this isn't a game where text is optional it is a core component, as no spoken dialogue exists in this game, it is purely just text, so if you have text that people can't understand you might need to re-evaluate. The developers have not dated the game yet, so with luck they can address some of these issues, but right now, I am enjoying the game, but there is a lot that could be better about it.