![]() I am quite certain we will soon see Loop-likes, and I am here for it.Every year, a fresh variation on the “ roguelite” genre comes out of left-field and becomes a mainstream hit. What it is, is something that will inspire a new genre. This isn’t a clever homage, or a throwback, even though it looks like it is. It has somehow taken so many familiar elements of game design, and made something entirely new. Yet, there’s also no other game to compare this to. Combat is simply watching your character attack, while you sort out which items you’re using. Collecting loot and leveling up in the game is straightforward, increasing in loot rarity and monster difficulty every time you start a new loop. The deck-building is simply picking the bonuses and towers you want to show up in your hand while you’re looping. You have a large grid, and you can place most buildings wherever you want within reason, and within a certain radius of other buildings. The basebuilding is fairly straightforward, but open-ended. There’s nothing here that should be entirely unfamiliar to the seasoned gamer. K, sometimes you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. There is a surprisingly wide variety of characters and a clever narrative to unravel. When you unlock these combinations, they are described in the in-game encyclopedia, but you will not be instructed on how to make them. However, these effects are not immediately obvious, and exist nowhere in the game’s description or lore. Like many other tower defense games, you can combine the effects of towers to either help you, or hinder the enemy, or sometimes vice versa and both. This game is way deeper than it appears on the surface, and even with the amount of time I’ve put in, I still haven’t figured out all the potential tower combinations that exist. Yet, somehow I’ve already done this for 35 hours in 3 days, so there’s something in there keeping me going, and it’s the depth. So far, it probably all sounds pretty straightforward, right? Do loops, get loot, repeat. So, while it is technically a roguelike, the elements are more of a gameplay mechanic, rather than simply your main incentive to stay alive. ![]() Death is not nearly as punishing as most games, and often serves as a narrative punctuation, and you even still get to keep at least 30% of what you gathered, or more if you have the right items which protect your losses. The roguelike elements are present, in that every loop is unique, and you start fresh at level 1 every time. It sounds repetitive–and it kind of is–but it’s also marvelously addictive. The point of it all, is to complete as many loops as you can before returning to your homestead, where you use the resources you acquire to build up your base, unlock new items and classes, so you can return to the loop to gather resources so you can continue to upgrade your base. You place towers along the way to give you bonuses and resources to collect, but they also act as spawners, increasing the number and variety of monsters in your path. Like a TD game, you have a set path of travel, except you are the character on the path, and baddies spawn to impede your progress. I’ll do my best to break down what makes this such a hit.įirst, you take two, simple, recognizable and ancient game formulas and flip em. Yet, this is probably the most innovative game of 2021, so far. Even following a guide wouldn’t make much sense without actually playing the game yourself, and it’d probably be pretty boring to watch a play-through. It’s a game that’s hard to describe, and even harder to illustrate with images. ![]() It rocks a very consistent 40,000 simultaneous players, which is pretty good for a roguelike, reverse-tower-defense, deck-builder. In its first week, it sold over 500,000 copies, and sits at a 95% with nearly 10,000 “overwhelmingly positive” reviews. ![]() While it hasn’t blown up quite to the extent of Valheim, which is an unstoppable machine of unrelenting consistency, it’s doing quite well for an indie game quite intentionally designed to look like it was made 30 years– so much so that it even has a CRT scanline filter. So I bought Loop Hero a few days ago, and can’t seem to do anything else.
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