A spectacular solution to game difficulty can be found in grinding. Is the boss too hard? Just grind until you can one-shot Gilgamesh. Is the game too easy? Nuzlocke so even Misty is Demon Souls.

Of course, we often don't make the decision to grind SOLELY in if the game is too difficult. Final Fantasy 12 and Pokemon Let's Go offer better treasures if you defeat multiple of a single monster in a row. You'll probably naturally grind if you try to do all the quests in Xenoblade Chronicles.

However, in Loop Hero, you'll grind just because it is fun to grind.

The game itself has a meta-loop of making plans, being surprised, and making new plans. For example, I made a plan to place tons of Villages around my loop as Villages provide higher-end equipment if you succeed at challenges. However, I didn't know that if you place a Vampire Mansion next to a Village, it turns the Village into a Ransacked Village. These were much tougher than a normal village, so I adjusted my plan. THEN I learned that a Ransacked Village becomes a Count's Land if it is crossed four times. The Count's Land gives you even better equipment than the Villages. This again changed my plan. I used accessories that made me stronger against vampires. I would do "Vampire loops" with a map covered in Vampire Mansions. I loved to grind "Vampire loops"

I really enjoyed my time with Loop Hero, but I am an unabashed grinding lover. Let me grind. I like to grind. If you like to grind and like to plan your grind/min-max your grind, Loop Hero is for you. But if you avoid grinding, avoid Loop Hero.

And yes, I did actually beat the game. As much as one can, but I did. What did I tell you? I love to grind, baby!

I played this game blind with a few friends. We all started playing it roughly at the same time. We began to figure things out and help each other out a bit and not spoil it too much for each other. And let me tell you that is the PERFECT way to play this game. It's a great game to slowly figure things out as you play it. Trust me, don't look up guides! Just give this a good chunk of time that it demands.

It's a fairly chill game so you can actually pick it up and play it. and if you have to quit you simply can at any point in a loop and you'll e able to keep playing it later. You can run it idle too (but i havent done that) with some risk an mal statuses.

Loop hero is a unique game that is a indie retro type template that has become so popular. The game is no gimmick however, as it manages to combine a lot of retro elements quite nicely. While it's not a true rogue-like, it has very rogue-like inspired elements (you make progress after a failed run, and you can never truly 'die') The game has a strange sense of balance that you can alter a bit as you learn more about the game. the games 'quirks' remind me of old strategy games from long ago that share that same kind of quirkiness. You cna pump a lot of time in this and still learn things that you didnt know. This 'unfolding' quality is pretty nice, maybe the strongest thing about the game.

As you play the game an learn more how to play it (initially i had no idea how it worked and really didnt have a feel for this game) you make progress, hoarding resources, building up a little village for yourself that helps you, and learning more about the story. Progress in this game, I found overall satisfying. It was always nice to put a night of work into loop hero, run lots of loops and call it a day knowing i'd be even stronger tomorrow on my next run.

Some might find the game repeititve. You do tend to do the same thing over, but its fun to experiment, to learn and to improve. (It's one of the few games that I found a real satisfaction in getting better at) Yu can build different decks or classes that work differently. Due to the way they made the game, I found the game to really only get repetitive at the very end of the game, which is perfectly fine.

It's also worth mentioning how awesome the sound and music is in this game. It's one of the coolest soundtracks in a game i've heard in a while. It's all very chiptune-y, Some of it reminds me of Famicom style, some much more sophisticate computers, its well composed. And the sound is great too! Everything has its own unique little sound, whether its placing this card or that card or you collect this resource or that resource, and when you collect a whole resource, you get a longer version of that initial ding (example 1 pebble makes a ding, but colleting 16 or so will form a stone which is a larger chunk that has a more embellished sound) as you play this game all these sounds come spewing out very quickly and its a pretty chaotic and gorgeous medley of all sorts of retro computer noise against a lovely chiptune soundtrack. Hard not to enjoy.

Worth a shot if you like strategy games, deckbuilding games or management games. (It's not that much of an RPG despite being stylized like one.)

Rogueli(k|t)es have been making a huge splash in the indie game space with many titles bringing their own unique spins to the ephemeral, microcosmic gameplay loop that's core to the genre and Loop Hero is no different. Part deck builder, part city builder, part RPG, part auto-battler, Loop Hero manages to marry its various influences into a satisfying experience that keeps you wanting just one more loop.

I think the game's beauty lies in the deck building. Before an expedition, one selects a deck of cards that will be used to populate the game map and completely influence the expedition the hero endeavors upon. This gives the player the ability to strategize about the stats they want to emphasize for that run and the enemies that the hero will encounter. Not only that, but there are unique synergies when different cards are played together that can make a big impact on the outcome of the expedition and whether the hero will be strong enough to defeat the expedition's boss once it's summoned.

In the early to mid-game, the deck building element gives the player the greatest sense of creativity. I really enjoyed strategizing which deck would best complement my chosen class to complete the run and garner me the most resources upon completion. One run I would employ cards to emphasize health regeneration for my hero to see how they would fare. Another run I would use the Spider card to spawn high numbers of weak spiders, each one having a chance to drop another card, so I could cycle through cards quickly for a better chance to get rarer, more impactful cards.

Unfortunately, while experimentation is rewarded early on in the game as you become familiar with the array of card options, it becomes punished as the difficulty begins to ramp up. In the mid to late game, enemies and the expedition boss become much more powerful, such that a sub-optimal deck of cards will quickly see your hero dead on the road, losing most of the resources you collected during the expedition. In fact, this scaling is so egregious that it becomes apparent there's really only one card combination that is reliable enough to see you through a successful expedition, regardless of which class you choose. The creativity that made the early game so exciting with each expedition is replaced by soulless min/maxing.

I think Loop Hero could have countered this inevitable balance problem two ways. The first is by increasing card variety and quantity to allow for more interesting deck builds. The second is by strictly tying certain resource awards to certain deck strategies. While there's already some requirements to receive each resource during an expedition, the requirements are so loose that you hardly need a plan to farm them. One exception is the Orb of Expansion, which only drops when the hero encounters a fight against more than 4 enemies at once. This restriction is so specific that only certain card combinations allow the resource to be farmed, requiring the player to tailor an expedition primarily to farm Orb of Expansion. This leads to that creativity that really makes this game shine. Which card combinations can give me more than 4 enemies to fight at once? What synergies do those cards have? Could they spawn more difficult enemies that certain stats are best against? Which class can best handle these 5+ enemies at once? If all resources were like the Orb of Expansion, then a player can be asking themselves these types of questions before every expedition instead of just defaulting to "River + Thicket + Suburbs + Spiders = Win".

One last thing I want to shout out is the music in the game. It's seriously one of the best game soundtracks I've ever heard. It's reminiscent of old school 8-bit video games. Each boss has its own theme that absolutely slaps, but that ties to a central motif and style for all the boss music throughout the game. The music was created by an artist called blinch, who you can find on YouTube. I'm still jamming out to it months after beating the game.

Loop Hero was close to a 3-star game for me, but I bumped it up to 4 because really had a blast playing it and think there's something here to enjoy for many gamers. Despite some balance issues and a failure to maintain rewarding experimentation, I really think Four Quarters landed on a winning formula with Loop Hero. I hope that the game will continue to get updates, or that we'll see it spawn a wave of successors which take the deck and city building combination to addictive heights.

I got hooked when I tried out the pre-release demo of Loop Hero, which rides on a unique blend of card-based auto-battler and building strategy. The protagonist leads the narrative as he sets out to restore the world that's been broken up by a mysterious force, which can only be restored through the "memories" you unlock and gather while fighting off powerful beings behind it. The lore can get philosophical about existence of being and the nature of our actions, brought up through dialogues with friends and foes alike.

It's easy to get caught up in the one-more-round loop (no pun intended) when you start from scratch building up the map with random cards that get dropped, assorted for your deck. Every round you make the loop make the enemies stronger but you also get stronger equipments and in time, you'll have built locations on the map that is beneficial for you. You'll also discover new results by combining and placing certain locations next to each other, resulting in new challenges and perks. The dropped resources can be used in the town stage to erect and upgrade structures that will affect your future loop playthroughs, which makes for a further addictive value enough to make you want to try again and again until you overcome the next boss.

I'll give kudos to both the graphics and sound designer, who manage to capture the nostalgic, old-school feel that hasn't been felt since the video games of the early 90s. At the same time, the technology of today allows for exquisite detail level that would make the game look and work accessibly for new generation players.

With all that said, there are negatives that weigh the game down against the favorable and addictive side of it. When I have got to act 3 of 4, I'm starting to feel the grind taking over here. When the challenge in your loop sessions are getting too much for you to gain new ground, the stagnation brings the enjoyment down. Only the assets you get can only do you good but it requires considerably more loot from the sessions you play, along with certain resources that is tricky to get. I also feel that I do a breakthrough through occassional trials-and-errors, alongside the luck with cards. Something is off when a game doesn't give the answer until you check the guide. In the end, I felt like I have better things to do than spend hours on Loop Hero until I get to the next upgrade.

Be wary of that fact while you are checking out the game. The unique genre crossover concept is refreshing, the audiovisual design makes for an enjoyable trip and the addiction value is felt in the first hours well, granted. You need to ask yourself if you can see yourself doing the repeated loop sessions interchanged with town building and deck tweaks. Personally, Loop Hero is mainly fun and enlightening, while the freshness lasts.