From: Four Quarters
For: Nintendo Switch, PC Rating: ★★★
Time manipulation mechanics were a bit of a thing in 2021, especially time loops. Deathloop springs to mind.
Loop Hero takes that concept of a time loop to a very literal extreme. It has been out for a few months on PC and was recently released for Switch, so I had a look.
The game starts shortly after an evil lich obliterates reality. The hero awakens at a camp site and sets out to rebuild the world. While the story is bare-bones at the beginning, intrigue and mystery is slowly drip-fed to you after you defeat bosses or erect new buildings at camp. It’s an effective, albeit slow, way of presenting story.
Loop Hero’s gameplay loop revolves around a randomly-generated path that you walk, defeating monsters and gaining cards, resources, and equipment. Battle and movement is performed automatically. Every time you ‘‘loop’’ around the path, the enemies get stronger, so it’s only a matter of time before you’re overwhelmed. You can stop a run at any point, losing some resources if you’re not at a campfire.
Cards are elements that you can place on a world to ‘‘rebuild’’ it. You can replace useful things, like rocks and mountains, which increase max HP, or a village, which is useful to heal. However, you also place where the enemy spawns, meaning you need to plan around splitting the enemies up.
Certain combinations of cards, when placed together, will have either a positive or negative effect. For example, you can turn a village into a ghost town by putting vampires next to it, but after a few loops, it will become a very powerful healing point.
Equipment boosts stats such as health, damage, and defence for your hero or offers more unique things like dodging, countering, and health regeneration. But if you equip over the top of something, it’s lost, so there’s an element of strategy in lowering some stats to bolster others.
Between runs you can head back to camp, where you can construct buildings with the resources you have collected. These may grant new cards, which give you more options, including changing your class and gameplay completely — for example, the necromancer class summons skeletons to fight on your behalf.
It’s neat, but there’s some downsides. If you like a lot of action in your game, don’t come looking for it here. You can only affect your character’s equipment and surroundings; all battles are auto-played. The game essentially plays itself but still requires your input to make any meaningful progress — ideas which don’t go well together.
Buildings are essential for progression and making your character stronger, but each requires a lot of materials, meaning a lot of runs before the next building is available.
Randomness also plays a large role in this game; not getting the right equipment or cards can lead to some disappointing runs.
I don’t think Switch is the right platform for this game.
There’s not much interactivity besides pausing, placing a few tiles, maybe switching equipment, and then resuming.
Loop Hero mashes a lot of ideas together. A deck-building, rogue-like RPG with extreme amount of variety in cards and builds. The
’80s pixel aesthetic and some great music should combine for one of the more interesting games of last year, but it’s held back by it’s shallow gameplay, overall slow progression, and clashing ideas.
If you’re a more patient strategy player than I, and maybe get it on a PC, you may find a lot more to like about it.
Another Playstation exclusive has come to PC. Kratos’ most recent adventure, God of War, is on Steam for PC players to enjoy.
I met posted requirements for “High” settings and it ran flawlessly on 1440p at a buttery smooth 60fps. Frame drops only happen when loading an area; however these are often unnoticeable or brief. It is very well optimised.
There’s also a few new features, such as DLSS, allowing you to have good-looking graphics and great performance on weaker hardware, and 21:9 widescreen support, as well as decent keyboard mapping (though playing on a keyboard isn’t my cup of tea for this sort of game).
There were some issues with 12th Gen Intel CPU’s at launch, but this has been patched, along with a few minor stability issues.
If you missed this a few years ago, I can whole-heartedly recommend a purchase of one of the best games from the last-generation of consoles.
By MICHAEL ROBERTSON
