Loop Hero is an indie game with an excellent artistic aesthetic of
suciedad de 8 bits '' con un concepto ordenado: en lugar de controlar directamente a tu héroe antes mencionado, lo envías en un ''loop'' to automatically fight enemies, only stopping to switch teams or add environmental tiles to complicate the circuit. Because Loop Hero is a rogue-type game, these environment tiles are given to you at random; you can't plan exactly what's going to happen, and every time you start a new loop, the map will end up looking very different. This also plays into the beginning of the game: the amnesiac protagonist wakes up to an empty world and begins to piece together what happened, literally one card token at a time. This interplay between gameplay and storytelling makes Loop Hero compelling from the jump, and after your initial 'death' ends your first run, you wake up to a campfire: your home between runs, a frontier colony that is slowly expands in the middle of cosmic nowhere to withdraw. after venturing in search of answers. Cherish that opening hour as the game gives you intriguing traces of what happened to the world, and how vestiges of its past affect its future. You'll be able to unlock a handful of new environment tiles and even another class or two after five or six hours, but the novelty of the interactions fades into the similarity... This is where things head south. Around hour three or four, all this captivating fun stops. The game bottlenecks progress through the construction of some buildings that require an arbitrarily high amount of resources to build. If you're an MMO veteran, you know what's coming: it's time, honey. For hours and hours. This transition is so abrupt that I felt a tonal boost as the story-rich gameplay faded into an immutable gameplay loop of sending my hero off on another run and zoning until things worked out. It became dangerous for the fourth or fifth circuit. You can either exit a run when you reach the campfire tile and keep any resources you find or, with caution, unite to the middle of the loop for 60% of your capture. Get killed enough in battle, bringing your proportion down to 30% of everything you've gathered, and you'll likely start dodging loops early on to reduce your potential casualties. Sure, you'll be able to unlock a handful of new environment tiles and even another class or two after five or six hours, but the novelty of the interactions fades into uniformity as you investigate a mismatch of different resources.
Hello ho, hello ho...
To some degree, this is all built into Loop Hero's design: without much direction, players have to experiment to progress through the game. Combine the tiles in new ways and you just might produce something unique. - a new environment or a monster that adds another small piece to the puzzle of what happened in this world. In a game designed to start out as an information void, discovering new ways to play fills the narrative and sets your direction.
It's a shame the pace slows down to an absolute rate after the first few hours.
Loop Hero isn't the first game to feed story and mechanics to players as they play, but the balance seems to be quickly weighed towards discovery through attrition: even as I eagerly encounter new player interactions. Tiles, just results in a new enemy to fight. This is not a way to avoid the hundreds of resources I'll have to use to build a new building in my border village.
And no, that's not an exaggeration: you'll need hundreds of bits of resources to get anywhere. Unfortunately, each enemy only drops 1-2 shards of a certain resource, and 10-20 shards combine into a full resource unit. This means that even basic structures can require multiple sets of resources to assemble: an early game building like a farm, for example, needs 5 Wood Orbs, 5 Stones, 3 Metals, and 2 Transmog Orbs.
If it takes 13 scrap shards to make a metal unit, think about how long it takes to collect 18 full metal units, as some later buildings require, and that's for the basic resources dropped: common enemies. Other more esoteric resources require the abandonment of much more complicated circumstances.
And yet those intriguing possibilities diminish in the rear view mirror and the routine of resources becomes the game, which begins to resemble paid mobile games.
Unfortunately, players will also get bogged down in the details of the resource grind instead of getting a chance to explore the exciting implications of all this drip-fed lore. One of the first things you discover is that there are vampires in the game! And they imply that they formed integral (albeit parasitic) parts of human society prior to this reality-wiping calamity! Every new creature you talk to and every human added to your frontier town and even item you pick up contributes to a fascinating array of world fragments trying to restore normalcy. (Relatable, right?) And yet those intriguing possibilities dwindle in the rearview mirror and the grind of resources becomes gameplay, which begins to feel detrimental like games that tend to progress progression behind excessive buildup. of resources: paid mobile games. Except in Loop Hero, what you pay for is time and stamina, and the fading hope that this new world has even more to offer than settling for the same tasks to spend your hard-earned earnings on...