Free to play games on all platforms have an uphill battle amongst gamers who grew up in the same millennial generation I did. They barely stand a chance with people who are even older than I am.
The mere presence of *any* free to play mechanics is seen as a black mark against any game that would dare to include them.
Microtransactions are the most obvious villain but energy mechanics, needlessly complex economies, appointment timer systems... these are all dead giveaways that gamers of a certain persuasion will use to dismiss a game entirely and move on from it.
But the truth of the matter is that free to play game designers, particularly those on mobile, know that they are fighting an uphill battle for your attention and some of their efforts to keep you hooked have already made their way into 'real games'. Games that you like. Games that you tell your friends to play.
Games like Loop Hero.
This is the 103% Review of Loop Hero.
(Get the game: Loop Hero)
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ENTER THE VOID
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Loop Hero was developed by Four Quarters and published by Devolver Digital.
This also marks the second game in a row that I've reviewed that was published by Devolver Digital, so I shall refrain from reviewing another game that they've published for a bit. See 'The Extra 3%' in this reviews' postscript for more details on this, along with some other goodies.
Loop Hero is a very nice video game, and I've been playing it on PC via Steam. I actually paid for this one unlike Sludge Life, which I got for free on the Epic Games Store. I paid £12.49 for Loop Hero.
That's a pretty good deal whichever way you look at it. But where Sludge Life is a nice little exploration game to play between larger games. This is the game that devours any time you happen to have going spare. Just be glad this thing isn't on your mobile phone asking you for money.
So what is Loop Hero?
You play as the nameless Hero who has amnesia. Don't recoil from the cliche because the narrative of Loop Hero takes the amnesiac hero to its extreme limit.
The whole world has amnesia. Not just the people either. The creatures, the towns, the very land itself. It's all been consumed and forgotten due to the machinations of The Lich. As the nameless Hero awakes in a void lit only by a campfire, a road spontaneously appears to form the eponymous Loop.
Trapped in a reality with nothing but this Loop, the Hero automatically walks along the path and returns to the campfire at the end of each lap.
You encounter a slime and start to fight it automatically. The game has lasted about 20 seconds at this point and you haven't actually done any gameplay yet. The Hero approaches and fights the slime with no input from you other than a few mouse clicks to advance dialogue. What's going on? When do I, the almighty player, get to do anything?
Eventually, things start happening, none are fully explained but all make enough intuitive sense to tease at the player's brain. A weapon drop from a slime zips over to an inventory, which can be equipped onto the Hero's strange loadout area. Strange playing cards depicting locations such as mountains, or meadows will appear in a sort of 'hand area' at the bottom of the screen inviting you to play it onto the black nothingness around the Loop, or onto the Loop itself. You do these things not because you have any strong sense of what the consequences should be but because this is a video game, and you do things in video games.
You equip weapons, you play cards onto the Loop. You see what happens.
Things happen.
That graveyard you put down said something about 'spawning skeletons at the start of each day'. What is a day? Why would I want to start spawning skeletons anyway? You notice the day counter in the top left ticking up, you notice that the skeletons have their own loot tables for weaponry and resources. You notice resources. You notice that the enemies get stronger as you complete laps of the Loop. You notice a mysterious 'skull' meter that fills up as you place cards onto the field. You wonder what happens if you can fill it...
You die, most probably. You encounter a town. A town that you can develop with resources. The buildings in the town all have effects of their own. You venture to the Loop again but this time you notice that you can deck build. You haven't mastered each card's nuances yet, and you won't for some time. You experiment, you learn, you discover new cards, creatures, classes, secret interactions between cards...
You just keep going. You keep trying. You keep building, discovering and learning.
For a game world set in an endless empty void, this game has a lot of systems crammed into it, and you'll want to master them all.
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THE (CORE) LOOP HERO
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And when I talk about 'the systems' of Loop Hero, what I really mean is 'the metagame systems' of Loop Hero. So I should make sure that everyone reading this knows what I mean by that as I don't think I can take that for granted.
Most games can be boiled down into two distinct types of 'gameplay' and the bridges that connect them to one another.
The first type of part is the 'base layer' which is usually what people refer to as the moment to moment 'gameplay' of a game. In Pong, this would be players moving paddles to deflect the ball. In Mario Kart, it's the driving and the firing of weapons in races. It's what you tend to show off in a 'gameplay trailer'.
The 'metagame' tends to be everything else. In Pong, as with most classic arcade games, the metagame layer is the high-score table on the arcade cabinet. Aside from entering initials and trying to secure a place on said board, the player barely interacts with it at all. In Mario Kart, the player earns trophies and star ratings for their performance in Grand Prix events, and time trial records act as a sort of local leaderboard. Again, not much interaction there.
However, even these bare-bones metagames with next to no interactive parts provide a strong sense of meaning to the base layer. What would Pong be without a high-score table? Where would the tension be in single player Mario Kart without the pressure to get a gold trophy? Even a basic metagame adds a lot.
The ideal videogame gets the player to focus on the base layer for a short while, but not so long that they get bored or tired. Once the base layer session is done, the player is kicked back out into the metagame layer, which should hopefully persuade the player to take part in more base layer fun later. In the Pong example, you play Pong, see your high score and think "hmm, I think I'll try that again". This back and forth between base layer and metagame is typically referred to as a "compulsion loop".
A more complex game may have many such compulsion loops, but there is usually a dominant one. We call this the Core Loop.
When games were new, and largely skill-based diversions, the base layer did most of the heavy lifting in establishing what made a game good or interesting.
Then complex stories were in games. A desire to see the plot and world of a visual novel became a metagame just as engrossing as the base layer verb of 'read text'.
Then RPG systems were in games. The term 'grinding' refers to often monotonous repeat battles of an often unchallenging base layer battles because the metagame of myriad character-building subsystems and a good story was worth it.
Then achievements were in games. Many a player has doubled down to play games they would otherwise have discarded long ago in search of trophies and gamerscore points, which in turn fed a 'meta-metagame' system of tracking progress across a whole library of titles on one platform for the purposes of showing dedication and skill in gaming.
At some time during all of this, we were told to catch 'em all. The Pokedex metagame layer became far more important than any single battle in the entire experience of a Pokemon player's career.
And of course, along came mobile, and the base layer was all but crushed in its wake, at least for a time.
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STEALING BACK FROM MOBILE
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Successful mobile games with a 'twitch skill' base layer are very rare. It's just very difficult to make that work on a small touch screen where real estate is at a premium. Not to mention that any given app needs to target a cornucopia of device types and screen sizes. Control schemes and camera placement choices are necessarily constrained so the base layer experiences on mobile tend toward simplicity, even when one isn't targeting a casual audience.
To finally bring this back around to Loop Hero, we find a game that is part of a subtle movement to throw out the free to play bathwater from traditionally 'evil' free to play design and keep the delightful meta-heavy, input-light base layer design (babies) from mobile. Core video games do not need to be centred around complex input systems and combat to be a worthwhile challenge. Loop Hero engages your brain in its entirety in every run but still allows one to keep a free hand to sip on a brew or check what's going on in chat.
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THE VERDICT
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Loop Hero isn't designed to monetise its players, but there are times where I would be tempted to spend gems or some form of premium currency to pick up the pace a little. There are plateaus in progress that can seem almost too much like a mobile game. That being said, I often find that the game rewards those that are willing to think deeply about optimising their builds towards key objectives. The game doesn't shower you with praise for figuring these things out but provides something of a neutral laboratory environment for players to test our strategies and praise themselves for their own cleverness.
I've only played this game in small doses, rather than longer sessions full of back to back runs, so I will admit to something of a blind spot in my research here. The game provides a tight 15-20 min experience that will fill up the back half of a lunch break, or as a welcome break from study. I can easily see the game satisfying a much longer gaming session much in the same way that one may decide to watch a single episode of a TV show and end up bingeing the whole season. The core loop of this game simply is that compelling.
As I said earlier, I'm very fortunate that this thing isn't on my phone. If you're looking for a new obsession, you would do well to consider Loop Hero. It's a mobile game for people who don't like mobile games.
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THE EXTRA 3%
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Welcome to the back pages! Thanks for reading this far. I hope you enjoyed my Loop Hero review!
My previous review in this series was Sludge Life, another game published by Devolver Digital. To keep things fresh my next review will absolutely not be a game published by them.
BANNED FOR ALL TIME:
Published by Devolver Digital
Although if you're not entirely familiar with Devolver Digital's offerings, they're a label worth looking out for. Games in their portfolio are rarely boring, often very good, and always worth the price of admission to find out. If there was a fringe arts festival of games, Devolver Digital's acts would be the one's that get talked about by the less insufferable hipsters.
If you like what I'm about please do consider interacting with me on Twitter @jak1oh3 and continuing the conversation there. I love talking to people who make and play video games so I look forward to hearing from anyone that fits that description :)
Thanks again for reading, it means a lot to me,
Jak
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