Review for Loop hero. Game for Linux, PC and Mac, the video game was released on 04/03/2021
The world is in ruins. A fearsome Lich has dissolved time and space, erasing reality and blurring the memories of the few survivors. Lo and behold, a nameless hero walking a circular path with the aim of rebuilding creation and defeating the fearsome enemy who destroyed everything. At the same time, in another reality, whole days run fast around a PC player without him noticing.
As if the curse of the Lich spreads beyond the limits of hardware and software, Loop Hero is able to distort time by dragging the player inexorably into the flow of yet another loop and into the vicious circle of yet another "I'll do the last one and that's it" , thus creating a meta link between the real and the digital.
Loop Hero is the perfect example of "easy to learn, hard to master". The title starts from rather simple mechanics, however, able to combine with each other and open up to a huge series of possibilities. But let's go in order. Our hero will start from a simple bonfire, the last bastion of reality in a world swallowed up by nothing, to venture along a circular path initially littered with simple slime. Through the fights you will get equipment and cards: two elements around the management of which the whole gameplay revolves. While in fact the advancement of the protagonist in the loop and the fights take place automatically, the player will have the right to change the equipment and play the cards found by pausing the game.
The latter are able to reconstruct a small piece of reality, thus being able to restore plains and mountains, rivers and deserts, the location of which will be useful, for example, to increase their HP or to receive periodic care. Other cards are dedicated to the construction of structures, some able to provide support to the hero, others that instead spawn more and more powerful enemies. And here the question arises: why voluntarily place enemies on the map and complicate life? The answer is as always in loot: the more powerful the enemies, the more interesting what they will drop once they are downed.
The positioning of the various cards on the map is able to provide multiple combinations with sometimes unpredictable effects: making a square of nine rocks or mountains will create a large peak capable of providing great resources and spawning harpies, while placing the abode of a vampire next to a village, it will make the latter a ghoul's lair. In short, a huge amount of different combinations to discover that will not fail to tickle the curiosity of the most hardened players. Each loop of this circular path will raise the level of the enemies, progressively increasing the difficulty of the game and forcing the player to wisely dose the positioning and quantity of enemy structures.
The ultimate goal is to bring as many materials as possible (such as wood, rock and metal) back to the bonfire, the only place in all of creation that has remained immune to disintegration. Here a small village will gradually be created; the construction of structures such as the forge, the camp kitchen and the library, will provide support during the loops, even going so far as to add entire gameplay mechanics or unlock new classes. The school, for example, will add an experience bar which, once completed, will allow you to choose a passive skill.
The various classes instead will equip our hero with unique equipment and skills: the thief, unlike the knight, will be able to equip two weapons and will not be able to wear armor, while the necromancer will be able to summon a small army of undead that will join him. in combat. Each time you return to the village, all the scenery built up to that moment (path, landscape and structures) will be completely reset, forcing the hero to start over, only strengthened by the bonuses of any new structures built at the bonfire. And here comes the first flaw in the game.
The despair expressed by the hero in learning that he will have to start over each time is another aspect able to make the transmedial leap and get straight to the player thus risking, in the long run, to become frustrating and demotivating.
In addition, the amount of resources required to build structures in the village is such that it forces you to several loop sessions in order to be accumulated, thus undermining that sense of progression so important to such complex and repetitive games. Loop Hero is fully part of the list of those games whose gameplay mechanics are so valid as to make the graphic aspect irrelevant: always, a winning formula for a successful indie. The visual sector is in fact rendered entirely with a series of sprites in pixel art, worthy of the 8-bit era. The hero and the monsters, in particular, are represented on the map as monochrome figures so stylized as to remember Atari 2600, so much so that you might even be able to count the number of pixels from which they are composed.
However, their size is so tiny that it is difficult to identify the hero in game sessions that are particularly crowded with monsters. The audio sector is in the same retro style; well contextualized but, in the long run, particularly repetitive and negligible, so much so that it can be completely disabled, thus making the game sessions at Loop Hero an excellent opportunity to listen to music or recover backlogs
In short, Loop Hero is a mixture of different genres, from roguelike to management, from tower defense to card games, which succeeds in the difficult task of finding a balance in the mixture of the mechanics of each of them, giving life to a unicum, which has already become the fashion of the moment. If you manage to overcome that sense of repetitiveness even explained by the title of the game, you will discover an unexpected depth capable of intriguing and thrilling so much as to make the hours flow unnaturally fast in these days of forced isolation. Devolver Digital has made another center.
► Loop Hero is an RPG-Strategy game developed by Four Quarters and published by Devolver Digital for Linux, PC and Mac, the game was released on 04/03/2021
