There's a wonderful moment early in Loop Hero in which the mechanics click — maybe it's from a specific combination of tiles, or a certain set of cards in your deck, or the interactions between a certain class and a set of enemy types. That moment really makes the game; all its possibilities spool out in front of you, all its possible metagames revealed, and it's quite wonderful. There are lots of possible deck combinations, lots of cool interactions and strategies that appear at the intersections between different cards, and that's really where it shines (aside from its art and soundtrack, which are top notch).

The problem is that, in the late game, most of those strategies just seemed to lose all viability. Beyond requiring a fair amount of grinding (I clocked about 35 hours by the time I beat Chapter 4), the final chapter really only felt possible to me via a single strategy — which essentially amounted to 1) boosting attack speed as much as possible and 2) accelerating days/enemy spawns as quickly as possible to farm cards and items for good drops and quick map filling. Fighting the bosses on an early loop makes them beatable; however, any other method I tried over a dozen runs just proved entirely unviable. Those last several hours left a sour taste that, while not at all ruining the great times I'd had up to that point, made me question its overall balance.