Loop Hero Review (PC)

What makes a hero successful? Is it carefully managed equipment, complete with extended special abilities? Is it the careful choice of the battlefield? A well-developed home base? A bit of luck and good level-up choices? Loop Hero will challenge players to consider all these questions and to try to create the best character they can, without being able to exercise direct control.

The title is created by Four Quarters Team and published by Devolver Digital, available on the PC. The game takes some classic rogue-like ideas and delivers a new spin on them, eliminating some apparently crucial player control while adding a very engaging layer of strategy. At first Loop Hero seems incredibly simple: a small stick figure moves along a procedurally generated lopping world, fighting blobs, which drop either cards or equipment. You cannot control the combat or the movement.

The little avatar does very simple things. What you can do is take the equipment that drops and equip him, trying for a build that defeats as many enemies as possible. Players also get a range of cards, down at the bottom of the screen, that they can use to build the world. This is where the complexity starts to pop up. Some of the cards allow the player to improve the stats of the roaming avatar. Some of them directly add enemies to the circuit. Some of them have special rules for their creature deployment. Others affect the game world in weird, positive, or negative ways. As the player progresses through Loop Hero more are unlocked and the interactions between various elements develop in interesting ways.

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The looped world has a day and night cycle and the avatar can gain experience and develop new abilities. As he moves and defeats enemies he gains much better equipment and choices become difficult, especially when factoring in special abilities like vampirism, magic, or evasion. And as the world gets filled with locations a meter counts down to a final showdown.

When a boss appears a hard final engagement results in a fully solved level and players can move forward in the meta-game. When the player's avatar dies (which happens a lot) it takes some resources back to an ethereal base. Gamers can use them to create buildings and upgrade them, opening up more cards, new abilities, and other extra options.

Loop Hero also has some neat story beats. There’s not a lot of complexity here but the story is well-written and has some engaging philosophical moments, asking questions about existence, identity, and memory. The gameplay is what kept me engaged for many hours but I was very happy to unlock a new building at camp delivered a new conversation to enjoy.

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The game starts relatively slow. But after three or four loops it becomes almost addictive. The limited control mixes well with the presence of engaging choices. What tiles do I now get to play with? Can I get a ton of resources to upgrade the camp buildings? Should I try for the boss or retreat while I can easily take out smaller foes? Will the cool Oblivion trait show up this time around? Where do I place my villages for maximum impact? There is a lot to think about and a lot of disappointment when something does not go according to plan, quickly supplanted by the thought that a better run is just a few minutes away.

Loop Hero has a retro look that I like but will not suit all tastes. It initially seems just a little too simplistic for it to work, with a simple stick figure moving around and the lack of detail on the enemies. But after a short while, it becomes clear that the developers want to focus the player's attention on the mechanics and not the graphics. After a few loops, it gets easy to see what enemies are coming, how the world is developing, and even identify the potential of pieces of equipment before hovering over them. The music, a little repetitive but entirely suited to the concept, also plays a role in immersing the player into this world of great mechanics.

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