The world has been put into a perilous situation and we have one amnesiac soldier as our saviour, and they’ll have to fight against the Dark Liche who has destroyed time and life as we know it! Loop Hero is a dark fantasy, strategy RPG game developed by Four Quarters, and to me, it is quite unique in its gameplay.

Joining the game you enter a loop, or an expedition as it is known while you’re not inside your campsite. During an expedition, or even while adventuring, you have two stages; planning and adventure. During Planning Mode you can place cards collected by killing slimes or any other type of mobs that spawned due to your card placement, however, you cannot attack or be attacked during planning mode due to it essentially pausing the game. When you enter Adventure Mode, you progress around the loop and stop to engage in combat before continuing the loop again. One key feature I liked was being able to equip weapons and gear, even while in combat.

In way of controls, the game plays itself with auto walking and fighting. All you will need to do is read the cards you gain as rewards for fights. The cards can either be played on the loop to increase material rewards that can be used back at the home camp, or they will spawn extra mobs to fight which will reward extra cards to place and use.

It’s something that I can play while doing multiple things at the same time since during Adventure Mode, I can trust my player to not die, and the style of the game makes it much more entertaining to watch as you progress given the unique genre.

I quickly became so obsessed with the game and found myself going back and forth through the camp collecting cards to build up my HP and recovery, and then fighting a variety of mobs. On top of planning, I discovered more and more about the storyline and its twists and turns, even though most of it is the general shenanigans of saving the world.

I enjoyed the beautifully unique art style and the up-close view of each character. It’s such beautiful art and detailing for a low interactive game, and I could play for hours while multi-tasking. The sound effects will slightly eat at your sanity the more you play, as it’s highly repetitive, as it is with any other game, however, the high-pitched noises are just more insanity-inducing. The music will irritate you, and even more so when you die and lose all your materials, tilting into rage-quitting territory. This can be balanced out by the also simple-but-awesome pixelated 32bit-like artwork that is a theme throughout.

The storyline itself can be bleak for the most part, however, it definitely has unique story points to it. When it explained that the Vampires used to co-exist with the people and they’re more like farmers, I was intrigued since that’s not the status quo for vampires in fantasy settings, but it fits with the story they’re going for.

This goes for all monsters, however, Harpies are treated with sadness as they can’t feed their kin and many more mob-like characters are treated with pity as the character spirals in fighting evil with another evil, killing those who just want to survive.

In conclusion, Loop Hero is a fun game that can be enjoyed by many, given the ease of playing and being able to safely run it without fear of the character dying on the easiest of foes. The art style for the game is worth a mention, with a simple style that blended in well with the theme for the game. I just wish there were more animations during the combat sections, and perhaps then I could forgive the horrible music.

Written by: Shane Walsh