Your goal is to have the hero do as many laps of the loop as they can before it grows too challenging, hoovering up resources to bring back to your basecamp for expansion. It’s an opaque learning curve, one that will have you googling the various cards to see what they do, but Loop Hero gives you ample opportunity to try different approaches and doesn’t punish failure too harshly. The game never quite explains this, so the first few hours are spent thwacking different monster types and paying close attention to how colourful the swords they drop are. Some enemies are weaker and drop much better stuff, and so they’re more valuable to have on your loop in small amounts. That mismatch hangs over everything you do, but once you’ve memorised enough of the card effects and understand how they affect your hero’s chances of survival, you fall into a fun and compelling rhythm of repeatedly bringing the hero to the brink of their abilities before backing off again. There’s an uneasy dissonance between your goal (help the hero win) and the only real action you can take (create a world that’s actively trying to murder them). The game encourages you to create enough monsters for your hero to fight against and become stronger, so when these additional monsters show up of their own volition, it can be difficult to understand whether you’re being rewarded or punished. Here’s where Loop Hero gets less coherent. A grubby little bandit camp will spring from the earth like a grease stain on your otherwise immaculately planned loop. You have cards that can remove unwanted tiles, but never enough of them, so you’re rarely in complete control of the shape of the world. Some enemy tiles will spawn automatically as punishment for building too much of a good thing, such as the goblin forts which are conjured into existence for every ten rock cards you put down. "There’s an uneasy dissonance between your goal (help the hero win) and the only real action you can take (create a world that’s actively trying to murder them)."Īs you play, the empty loop gains character, winding through bucolic strips of villages and wheat fields, to dangerous alleys where you’ve been overzealous with haunted ruins, spider coves and bloody battlefields. After three loops of this, the damned village evolves into a kind of super village, hardened by its vampiric overlord and now able to offer you twice as much health as before. Stick a vampire mansion next to the village and the village becomes damned, no longer giving any health benefits but instead populated by tough ghoul enemies. Place a village on the path and it will heal your hero each time they visit, as well as giving them a quest to kill a specific monster somewhere else on the loop for bonus experience points. How each building affects the ones around it is a matter for experimentation. Environmental tiles such as forests, deserts and mountains can be placed everywhere outside the loop, partly as decoration, partly to grant teeny stat buffs that accumulate over time as you fill in the empty landscape, like if Bob Ross were a dungeon master. Stick a lantern on a corner and its light will reduce the number of nearby monsters, making one small section of the loop that bit more hospitable. These can be held, or placed on the loop to present your hero with a new obstacle to overcome, and so a reward to reap.ĭrop a cemetary on the loop and your hero can battle a skeleton each time they pass through. Defeated enemies also drop cards representing different buildings, places or magic effects. The quality of the loot you collect depends on the type and quantity of the monsters in your path, so it’s in your interest as the world’s overlord to populate your hero’s loop with things to swing a sword at. To counter this, you can continually dress your hero up in the weapons and armour that monsters drop to improve their abilities. Your hero will do this for as long as you let them, or until they die, because with each completed loop the monsters become incrementally tougher. Round and round they go, trapped but resolute, like a greyhound on a malfunctioning racetrack, where someone forgot to turn off the hare and the crowds have long since gone home. Press "go" and your hero will scuttle off like a locomotive on a train set, encountering monsters, slaughtering them in quick, uninteractive battle scenes, collecting the loot and cards they drop and then continuing on their fated way.
LOOP HERO STEAM FREE
Loop Hero is an auto-battler, which means it plays itself, leaving your hands free to stroke a dog or learn the ukulele. From: Steam, GOG, Humble, Epic Games Store.Loop Hero is a peculiar blend of hands-off roleplaying and light card-based strategy, and it's very, very addictive.