I'm sure it must get better after 20 or 30 hours, but after several hours in a row of just grinding metal scraps, I think I'm done waiting.
...is how I would have originally opened my review if I had really stopped playing when uninstalling the game out of frustration after nine hours of play. However, I'm not too eager to hate on games, especially ones like Loop Hero that, armed with a zero dollars marketing budget, became so beloved: if so many people came to like it, I wanted to know how it worked and what made it click. Sure enough, my insistence led to an answer, but one that made me more confused rather than less. Strap in, and let's examine why this game has been living in my head rent-free for a while now.
What is Loop Hero, anyway? Its premise is that the world is being erased by a supernatural entity and its remnants are slowly forgetting all that used to exist. You play as a young hero who attempts to resist the destruction, going on expeditions to gather materials and build a village along with other survivors. These expeditions have them looping around a set path on the world map, passing by their camp after every lap. The twist is, although the path through the map might be set, its contents are not: with every battle, the hero earns cards that can be used to place landmarks around the map, like groves, meadows, ruins, etcetera -- as if remembering what the world used to be like before.
These cards, when placed, give boons to the hero, but also cause enemies to appear in their path that could bring an end to their adventure. The goal is to survive long enough to place enough tiles and spawn a boss, whose defeat unlocks the next act of the story. Between expeditions, resources can be used to build new facilities around the village and upgrade the existing ones. In true roguelite fashion, doing so unlocks permanent bonuses for your character, like stat increases, new classes, extra lives and so on, and also unlocks more cards containing different landmarks to assemble a deck with and use in the expedition map.
The game's poetic setting quickly gives way to frustration, as the player is left to reason about Loop Hero's incredibly cryptic mechanics on their own. It’s hard to understand what makes a deck good; the in-game texts explaining cards and stats are vague, when not misleading; and there are hidden interactions that the game does not explain whatsoever. This extends into the expeditions, which make for lengthy gameplay sessions even at max game speed, and should they come to an end through the hero’s death – a highly likely outcome, as enemies also have opaque rules and interactions to them – the player is punished by losing most of the resources gathered.
That’s where the grinding kicks in, as players turn to the one thing they see some progress happening in: the village. By slowly gathering resources over the course of their expeditions, one figures they might accrue enough bonuses to power through the seemingly impossible hordes of enemies. That's where I originally stopped: completely stumped by Act II, at the end of a long grind for Metal Shards that was leading into an even larger grind of Orbs of Evolution. My conclusion was that the game was a grindfest and not worth my time. But was it, really? I eventually started thinking that if the game was truly a grindfest, then speedruns of it must also take hours. A quick search yielded this, which I watched intently.
Later that day, I reinstalled the game and beat it within an hour and a half, finishing the three remaining acts in almost back-to-back runs.
There is no grinding in Loop Hero. There isn't a single point in the game where you have to stop and grind, and doing so it's a consequence of playing the game wrong. Mystery solved! It's a case of, as the kids say, git gud, amirite? Except, nobody plays the game wrong intentionally, they do it because the correct answer is unclear and/or something leads them down the wrong path. What is going on? What is it about Loop Hero that guides people towards ruining their own experiences?
The first factor is the general haziness surrounding the mechanics I previously went over. The second is in the risk-reward ratio heavily skewing towards "risk". A simple example can be found in choosing to end the expedition after finishing a loop: loops grow increasingly dangerous the higher their number, and staying for one more loop and dying would lose you 70% of your total resources. Surviving one more loop would yield 10%, maybe 20% more? Better to play conservatively and do short expeditions. And what about increasing the spawn of enemies? A definite no-no, as it could easily result in death! The game even helpfully gives you the Road Lantern card to prevent spawns from getting out of control!
Which leads me into the third factor that pushes people into “playing wrong”: there are very few ways to play correctly, as Loop Hero offers a very narrow set of viable builds. I'd risk saying two thirds of the game's cards are unusable, which, for a deck builder, where you generally expect most cards to be viable so long as the rest of the deck synergizes with them, is disastrous. Classes, too, seem like they can be built around different stats, but in reality, there are definitive answers to what must be prioritized, if for no other reason that each boss is a specific mechanics check. To say nothing of traits: picking any boss trait whatsoever is making the game harder on yourself as all of them suck, and their presence reduces the chance of rolling the few good ones. In short, if you don’t build everything exactly as the game wants you to, you’ll die, over and over and over again.
Combine these three things and it’s almost inevitable to come to the conclusion that the only way out of this loop (no pun intended) is to grind the difficulty away, playing each expedition super carefully and slowly amassing materials. Never mind that aggressively placing cards and maximizing encounters is the key to success, both in terms of obtaining more cards and equipment that can further the current expedition and in terms of maximizing the materials you bring back to the village: to give a concrete example, before doing research on the game, I was painstakingly obtaining 1~3 Orbs of Evolution per expedition. After fixing my builds, I easily raked 20~40, along with loads of most other resources. This is why I say there’s no grinding: the material yields are far higher than one might expect.
Anyway, mystery solved²! I figured that was how Loop Hero operated. People who like the game are the ones who figure out which builds to use, play aggressively and finish it quickly, and people who dislike the game are the ones who get stuck in the grind. As we can see from the looking at the game's reviews:
- Steam user StaticSpine recommends it, saying “...it overstays its welcome and becomes way too grindy starting from Act III. But the first ~20 hours I had a blast.”
- Steam user technocosm does not recommend it, ”...the progression is slower than most microtransaction-ridden mobile games.”
- Steam user mercenaryai recommends it, ”...quickly becomes a time-wasting grind.”
Ah.
In the end, it’s not so simple: most reviews mention grinding as a defining aspect of the experience, even the positive ones – in fact, to some people, the punishing grind is the enjoyable part of the game. So where does that leave me? With the game still living rent-free in my mind, I suppose. Maybe my assumption that there is a correct, developer-intended way to play the game is wrong, as much as it irks me to think that the grind is an intentional design choice instead of accident. Some people also mention that they enjoy the game because it’s very hands-free, and they use it to keep their minds busy while multitasking, which I guess I understand, though I would definitely pick a less punishing game.
In the end, would I recommend the game myself? The game design field trip was certainly intriguing, but I would have to say “no”. Aside from the very real risk that anyone that plays this will end up farming for hours on end, a deck builder that provides so few viable options is not a very good one. But it is a fascinating game, and there is legitimate untapped potential in the concept: the ideas behind the game are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Maybe a Loop Hero 2 will eventually come up, with better balance and more in-game information, and deliver on all that potential.
...is how I would have originally opened my review if I had really stopped playing when uninstalling the game out of frustration after nine hours of play. However, I'm not too eager to hate on games, especially ones like Loop Hero that, armed with a zero dollars marketing budget, became so beloved: if so many people came to like it, I wanted to know how it worked and what made it click. Sure enough, my insistence led to an answer, but one that made me more confused rather than less. Strap in, and let's examine why this game has been living in my head rent-free for a while now.
What is Loop Hero, anyway? Its premise is that the world is being erased by a supernatural entity and its remnants are slowly forgetting all that used to exist. You play as a young hero who attempts to resist the destruction, going on expeditions to gather materials and build a village along with other survivors. These expeditions have them looping around a set path on the world map, passing by their camp after every lap. The twist is, although the path through the map might be set, its contents are not: with every battle, the hero earns cards that can be used to place landmarks around the map, like groves, meadows, ruins, etcetera -- as if remembering what the world used to be like before.
These cards, when placed, give boons to the hero, but also cause enemies to appear in their path that could bring an end to their adventure. The goal is to survive long enough to place enough tiles and spawn a boss, whose defeat unlocks the next act of the story. Between expeditions, resources can be used to build new facilities around the village and upgrade the existing ones. In true roguelite fashion, doing so unlocks permanent bonuses for your character, like stat increases, new classes, extra lives and so on, and also unlocks more cards containing different landmarks to assemble a deck with and use in the expedition map.
The game's poetic setting quickly gives way to frustration, as the player is left to reason about Loop Hero's incredibly cryptic mechanics on their own. It’s hard to understand what makes a deck good; the in-game texts explaining cards and stats are vague, when not misleading; and there are hidden interactions that the game does not explain whatsoever. This extends into the expeditions, which make for lengthy gameplay sessions even at max game speed, and should they come to an end through the hero’s death – a highly likely outcome, as enemies also have opaque rules and interactions to them – the player is punished by losing most of the resources gathered.
That’s where the grinding kicks in, as players turn to the one thing they see some progress happening in: the village. By slowly gathering resources over the course of their expeditions, one figures they might accrue enough bonuses to power through the seemingly impossible hordes of enemies. That's where I originally stopped: completely stumped by Act II, at the end of a long grind for Metal Shards that was leading into an even larger grind of Orbs of Evolution. My conclusion was that the game was a grindfest and not worth my time. But was it, really? I eventually started thinking that if the game was truly a grindfest, then speedruns of it must also take hours. A quick search yielded this, which I watched intently.
Later that day, I reinstalled the game and beat it within an hour and a half, finishing the three remaining acts in almost back-to-back runs.
There is no grinding in Loop Hero. There isn't a single point in the game where you have to stop and grind, and doing so it's a consequence of playing the game wrong. Mystery solved! It's a case of, as the kids say, git gud, amirite? Except, nobody plays the game wrong intentionally, they do it because the correct answer is unclear and/or something leads them down the wrong path. What is going on? What is it about Loop Hero that guides people towards ruining their own experiences?
The first factor is the general haziness surrounding the mechanics I previously went over. The second is in the risk-reward ratio heavily skewing towards "risk". A simple example can be found in choosing to end the expedition after finishing a loop: loops grow increasingly dangerous the higher their number, and staying for one more loop and dying would lose you 70% of your total resources. Surviving one more loop would yield 10%, maybe 20% more? Better to play conservatively and do short expeditions. And what about increasing the spawn of enemies? A definite no-no, as it could easily result in death! The game even helpfully gives you the Road Lantern card to prevent spawns from getting out of control!
Which leads me into the third factor that pushes people into “playing wrong”: there are very few ways to play correctly, as Loop Hero offers a very narrow set of viable builds. I'd risk saying two thirds of the game's cards are unusable, which, for a deck builder, where you generally expect most cards to be viable so long as the rest of the deck synergizes with them, is disastrous. Classes, too, seem like they can be built around different stats, but in reality, there are definitive answers to what must be prioritized, if for no other reason that each boss is a specific mechanics check. To say nothing of traits: picking any boss trait whatsoever is making the game harder on yourself as all of them suck, and their presence reduces the chance of rolling the few good ones. In short, if you don’t build everything exactly as the game wants you to, you’ll die, over and over and over again.
Combine these three things and it’s almost inevitable to come to the conclusion that the only way out of this loop (no pun intended) is to grind the difficulty away, playing each expedition super carefully and slowly amassing materials. Never mind that aggressively placing cards and maximizing encounters is the key to success, both in terms of obtaining more cards and equipment that can further the current expedition and in terms of maximizing the materials you bring back to the village: to give a concrete example, before doing research on the game, I was painstakingly obtaining 1~3 Orbs of Evolution per expedition. After fixing my builds, I easily raked 20~40, along with loads of most other resources. This is why I say there’s no grinding: the material yields are far higher than one might expect.
Anyway, mystery solved²! I figured that was how Loop Hero operated. People who like the game are the ones who figure out which builds to use, play aggressively and finish it quickly, and people who dislike the game are the ones who get stuck in the grind. As we can see from the looking at the game's reviews:
- Steam user StaticSpine recommends it, saying “...it overstays its welcome and becomes way too grindy starting from Act III. But the first ~20 hours I had a blast.”
- Steam user technocosm does not recommend it, ”...the progression is slower than most microtransaction-ridden mobile games.”
- Steam user mercenaryai recommends it, ”...quickly becomes a time-wasting grind.”
Ah.
In the end, it’s not so simple: most reviews mention grinding as a defining aspect of the experience, even the positive ones – in fact, to some people, the punishing grind is the enjoyable part of the game. So where does that leave me? With the game still living rent-free in my mind, I suppose. Maybe my assumption that there is a correct, developer-intended way to play the game is wrong, as much as it irks me to think that the grind is an intentional design choice instead of accident. Some people also mention that they enjoy the game because it’s very hands-free, and they use it to keep their minds busy while multitasking, which I guess I understand, though I would definitely pick a less punishing game.
In the end, would I recommend the game myself? The game design field trip was certainly intriguing, but I would have to say “no”. Aside from the very real risk that anyone that plays this will end up farming for hours on end, a deck builder that provides so few viable options is not a very good one. But it is a fascinating game, and there is legitimate untapped potential in the concept: the ideas behind the game are unlike anything I’ve seen before. Maybe a Loop Hero 2 will eventually come up, with better balance and more in-game information, and deliver on all that potential.