Who games on Linux? #2 Loop Hero #

Loop Hero is a tower defense Idle game with some RPG systems.

Game info #

Name: Loop Hero

Genre: Hybrid of card games, roguelite, city builder and idle clicker genres

Demo: It has a demo on Steam

Linux: It has a native Linux build. Works well

Thoughts #

Earlier this week I picked up Loop Hero after hearing about it from HexDSL. This is an incredibly interesting game both to play and from a design perspective. I'm rarely a fan of idle clicker games or city builder games, and don't play many card games, but this just hits the sweet spot. The way the game works, is that there is a loop of tiles, and you go around. There's a day timer, and a number of completed loops. The latter counter scaling the equipment strength and enemy strength, and the former is for tile triggers to occur.

When you fight enemies you have a chance to get a card(from a deck you build, so you can make card synergies), and you have a chance to get equipment. The equipment has plain statistics like health, defense E.T.C. but it also has more interesting statistics like vampirism, counter and evade among other interesting statistics that can be used to make a character build stronger. The fights play out in an idle format, but you can't completely idle as you need to be swapping out armour and also placing tiles.

When you place tiles, you usually get resources. Tiles can also change if specific tiles are next to other specific tiles, and as a result you need to think about what kinds of tiles you want on your board. They also have placement rules, so that has to be thought about- and they usually have an effect on neighbouring tiles.

It's a really interesting dynamic of building a character, placing tiles that spawn enemies you want, or create dynamics with other tiles you want.

The game also doesn't asphyxiate itself in introduction of content and interesting content too. There's plenty here to play, and there's plenty of card synergies. This is one of the things that free-to-play games rightfully do, as they do need to make an income.

I also haven't mentioned much about resources. Resources are taken to your home camp so you can build it up in a "clash of clans" style home base, where after each expedition, you gain more resources- or providing resources for your next expeditions. This plays into the roguelite aspect as you can gain new cards for your deck- however this resource management also plays into the gameplay in expeditions. Whenever you die, you take 30% of your resources back to base. Whenever you retreat back to base anywhere in the loop, you take 60% of your resources back to base. Whenever you're on your home camp, or the boss of that expedition has been summoned(bosses are summoned by placing enough tiles) you can take all of them back with you- so you have this dynamic of risk-reward... should I do one more loop, or make it back with what I've got?

It's a marvel in design showing what happens when you thoughtfully take the best elements of different genres and put them together to make an entertaining, relatively chill experience. The best bit is that it's not brain-numbingly boring as is a common experience I have with either city-builder or idle-clicker games.

On other notes, the art style is very nicely done using the Commodore-64 colour scheme and excellent art- giving the game a nice and bleak aesthetic fitting for the narrative. The narrative, as I've played so far, doesn't seem to be anything big or interesting. I guess it's like the classic Carmack saying "Story in a Game is like Story in a Porn Movie: It's expected to be there, but not very important". Music and Sound design isn't really anything spectacular. It loops nicely and doesn't grate on your ears, but that's after playing for 5 hours. I wonder how much longer it will be before the music gets annoying, as it is just looping music.

Anyway, this game runs well on Linux, and is a blast to play. Go check it out if you haven't already as there's a demo for it.

Final Information #

• Played Version: V1.012
• Linux Compatibility: Native
• Hours Played: 5.6 hours
• Will I return to it: Yes(I haven't completed it at time of writing), and yes if more content is added

Published on 2021/03/12