Been a bit slow to post reviews because I’ve been a bit slow playing through RPGs… But I’ve been playing this little thing on the side as well. And I still have other smaller games I want to get into soon.

Loop Hero I remember seeing at some event last year alongside a bunch of other Devolver Digital announcements. This was the one that was most interesting to me in that bunch, IIRC. Definitely seemed unique.

So let’s go and see if it’s good!

Developer: Four Quarters
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release date: March 4th 2021
Platforms: PC
Genre: Roguelite card-based… simulator?

So it’s kinda hard to properly describe Loop Hero since I know of no games, off-hand at least, that play like this. It has some rogue-lite elements, it’s kind of card-based but not entirely, it has simulator elements… And parts of it plays itself, namely movement and combat… Which at a glance sounds like most of the game.

The game has 2 basic screens: expeditions (the core gameplay) and town building (which supports the expeditions). In expeditions you fight enemies and gather resources, while in town building you use those resources to build things. Yay.

Expeditions are where the game really differentiates itself. When you start an expedition you start on a square with a campfire, then a looping road builds itself at random. Then your hero character starts walking, on his own, with no input from you. When he encounters monsters, he fights them, on his own, with no input from you. You can pause the walking or fighting, but that’s your only character control. You have a different role from the hero. Basically, the hero killing monsters and doing loops through the path gives you different rewards. It can give you resources (for use in town building), cards and equipment. Equipment is pretty simple. Each character class has 4 to 5 equipment slots, each housing a specific kind of equipment. So ring slots only allow rings, and so on. As you do loops of the path, you get access to better weapons, and there’s different rarities as well. White has just base stats, blue has one extra ability, yellow has 2 and orange has 3. The higher the level, the better the stats may be. Pretty simple there. Special abilities can be extra attack speed, hp regen, vampirism, defense, magic damage, damage to all enemies and a few other things. You have to weigh which pieces of equipment are better for you as you get them.

Cards are the biggest element here, since equipping the hero is pretty simple. Basically, the whole play area is a big  21×11 grid, with each space being a square. The cards are “pieces” of environment that will fill a square. Some cards can be placed on the road the hero walks, some outside the road (and usually can’t be directly adjacent to the road), some adjacent to the road, some can’t be placed right next to any other filled tiles (but can later be surrounded). The game does highlight where cards can be placed so there’s really no issue there. These tiles have a variety of effects. Forests, for example, are placed off the road and give the hero a 1% (or 2% if it’s a thicket, or 4% if said thicket is next to a river) boost to attack speed. Cards placed on the road tend to have functions when the hero passes over them (the grove gives one wood fraction resource when the hero passes on it), and also some features when a day passes (there’s a meter for how long a day is). Different tiles will summon different monsters.

Some cards also have special effects elsewhere on the board. Rocks and mountains, for example, become a big mountain (once per run) when you do a 3×3 grid of them. Every 10 rocks/mountains also randomly places a goblin camp someone next to the road, which will spawn goblins on that portion of road. Some of these cards are semi-positive, like the village giving you a bit of healing and also a quest… the quest does buff an enemy though, which can make them really hard to deal with, but you get rewarded for killing that enemy. There’s lots of cards so I won’t explain them all, but they all have interesting effects and you can experiment with which cards you’ll go out with (there’s limitations as to how many card types you can bring with you, both with a minimum and a maximum, in different categories). And some cards also have special effects with other cards. For example, a vampire manor placed next to a village turns all the villagers into zombies for you to kill, but then a few loops later it becomes a better town which will give you quests with better rewards than regular villages. A river next to a battlefield changes it into a shipwreck which summons sirens rather than “blood clots” (and the chests are a bit better since they won’t turn into mimics).

There are 3 character classes in the game right now. They have different kinds of abilities and gameplay. The warrior has access to equipment that boosts vampirism, which regens hp on hit. The rogue doesn’t gain weapons from killing enemies, instead he gets trophies that he can trade in at the campfire for equipment at the end of every loop (he also starts with based 5% vampirism but can’t get any more). The necromancer only attacks if he has all his skeletons summoned, otherwise he just summons skeletons, which then attack on his behalf, and his equipment powers up his skeletons more than himself. I find the rogue considerably stronger than the other 2 myself. Even if he’s not getting equipment during a loop, getting a big pile at the end of a loop is a good compensation, and his attack strength is very good since he can equip 2 weapons.

One of the big issues with the expedition segments of the game, if you ask me, is the speed. You can double speed the game (there’s a button at the top of the screen for it), but that’s only for the movement, and it’s still kinda slow. Thankfully, in the game’s folder there’s an variables.ini file you can edit. Just find the game_speed variable and put that shit to 180 (or more if you want, whatever you want though I think 180 is a good balance of speed and still being able to see what’s happening). This makes both the combat and field movement 3 times faster, in addition to the in-game x2 modifier. There is one issue with doing this, that being that treasuries being completed gives you fewer rewards. Maybe this is just a glitch that will be fixed, and maybe the option to change game speed will be added to the game proper in a future patch so the ini edit wouldn’t be needed anymore. Doing this doesn’t prevent getting achievements if you care about pointlessness, though I assume changing other variables probably does (since you can edit a LOT of things in that file like enemy health). It does seem like the devs are hard at work adding QOL updates, bug fixes and entirely new content as time goes on, so that’s good.

Town building is what you do if you’re not on expeditions. Basically, resources you get from expeditions are used here. Resources are given in small pieces that group up to become one whole resource chunk when you get enough (sometimes 10, sometimes more), and the big chunks are what you need. The town itself is also a grid like the expeditions, but it’s smaller so the squares are bigger. You can place buildings in either empty spaces or fields, depending on the building type. Buildings have a variety of effects. 2 of them unlock the extra 2 character classes (at first you just have the warrior). Some of them make the character stronger. Towers add archers that can help you when you’re near the campfire on the loop (but not during boss battles which are on the campfire). Some unlock new cards. Some gives your town new features, like giving you access to a supply of items, or giving you more slots in that supply to bring more items with you. Or crafting which lets you make items from the supply (or dismantle items you don’t want). Or alchemy which lets you destroy resources to get hydrogen, which you then use to make different materials… very very useful. The town building isn’t super deep, there’s a few ways to mess up where you may need to destroy a building to place another one (happened to me once for the warehouse, which had to be next to a specific building). It’s basically something to power you up a bit for expeditions. You never spend much time in town.

Overall

Loop Hero is a fun game, but at the same time it does get rather repetitive. The speed up method with the ini file certainly helps, but basically your victory becomes more a matter of RNG in the later parts of the game… especially the final boss, who can randomly kill you for free by eliminating your + Max HP stat (he eliminates stats at random as you fight, and changes what’s being eliminated). Also by the end I had a flowchart. I’d play with all the same cards, place them all the same way every time (had a spot for suburbs, a river to place thickets along in a pattern, and the rest was random mountains and forests), it was really just a matter of the final boss not randomly removing my HP if I got to him.

It’s still good though. It has unique gameplay that focuses more on overall strategy and decision-making when it comes to both placing cards and deciding what pieces of equipment to use. As long as you increase that speed.

Good game, I recommend it. If we get more content as time goes on that would be great, but as it is I’d say it’s worth the price right now.