

Villages offer you small quests and healing outside of your campfire but also attract thieves who will steal equipment off your back while in a fight.

A group of Mountains placed together will turn into a Peak, which gives you a nice resource bonus but also starts spawning enemy harpies you'll have to contend with. Not all effects are beneficial to your hero, either. Place it next to any existing structure, however, and this effect is buffed. Meadows, which heal you at the start of each day, can be placed around a loop to give you additional health at the start of each new day. And because you're ultimately in control of the overall difficulty and balance of each run, even brutal failures still feel fair-and clutch victories are all the more satisfying when you successfully risk it all on one more loop.Ī lot of Loop Hero's fun stems from the vague descriptions of cards and figuring out how different cards can play off each other. You're able to flee at any point during a loop if you're not engaged in battle, but you only take everything you've earned if you do so at the single campfire on the path. Overestimating your ability is punishing-if you die in battle, you only get to keep a third of the resources you've gathered during that run. Each battle rewards you with additional cards and loot, forcing you to recalculate the right balance of risk that fits with your current capabilities and the current toughness of enemies. While a tile might seem harmless when it's only adding one enemy to the loop every day, it can become dangerous when the route is stuffed to the point where an entire group might be waiting the next time you make it around again.īalancing the placement and density of enemies on the loop is what will inform each of your moves, pushing your understanding of how each of these small singular systems play out over extended stretches of time. With each new addition to the loop, you're also extending the time it takes to make a trip around it, which directly affects spawn rates of enemies that are tied to a persistent day-night cycle. Enemies drop specific resources that you'll need to further progress outside of each expedition, giving you incentives to place multiple groves for wild, mutated dogs or dimly lit houses that can spawn bloodthirsty vampires on tiles around them. Each run is an opportunity to gather resources you use to expand your camp in the hub world, unlocking new cards, classes, and abilities to use on subsequent runs.

Ultimately, Loop Hero challenges you to balance risk and reward by keenly considering all the options your current cards give you to make your next loop challenging, but not deadly. Instead of controlling the hero's movements in Loop Hero, you control what they encounter on the loop. And while your hero automatically navigates in circles and resolves fights with enemies without any inputs, you also manage their inventory carefully to deal with the increasing challenges that each new round trip brings. These are provided by cards that you draw from a limited deck which you can edit between runs, letting you curate each one to a degree. Instead of controlling the hero's movements, you mainly control what they encounter by placing objects on the loop that create the world-things like cemeteries that can spawn skeletons, villages that can heal you, or swamps that generate nasty mosquitos. Loop Hero is primarily a run-based role-playing game in which you indirectly control a hero through procedurally generated loops. Loop Hero is a distinct mish-mash of multiple genre ideas, none of which influence gameplay enough to easily classify the overall gameplay experience. It's a riveting balance of risk and reward wrapped in a deviously challenging roguelite that will tempt you into pushing forward for just one more round. This captivating mix of familiar genres demands constant attention, testing your ability to think well into the future when making your moves.

Battles play out without any input from you, navigation loops over a predetermined path, and resources are collected for you, but that doesn't mean you can take your eyes off the battlefield for even a second. For all its automated systems, Loop Hero can be incredibly stressful.
