Loop Hero is a Refreshingly Great Tile Placement RPG
Inventory management, resource-gathering, tile placement, and synergistic deckbuilding create a compelling loop of content
Loop Hero, developed by Four Quarters Games and published by Devolver Digital, is a compelling new RPG packed to the brim with tile placement and deckbuilding, RPG mechanics, roguelike progression that persists between sessions, and a hint of luck/cycle optimization. It’s a strange mix of content and game mechanics that feels like a mash-up of a pen-and-paper RPG and Carcassone, a popular tile placement board game with a very different theme. It’s as fun as it is difficult to describe.
Disclaimer: I received a free press review copy of Loop Hero. I have no financial stake in Devolver or Four Quarters Games and this article is entirely uncompensated. All opinions are my own.
If you’ve been following my content on SuperJump, you’ll know I’ve been playing a ton of Valheim. In the same vein, I can see Loop Hero easily becoming one of my favorite breakout games of the year. It’s simply that good and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down even almost 10 hours in. The more I play, the more engaging it gets. The RPG elements, scaling complexity, and interesting lines of play across the different mechanics that all feel like a perfectly tuned machine create an incredible experience that BURNS through hours.
Each loop of each expedition seeks to add incremental progression while also giving the player plenty of agency to balance their preferred risk and reward.
Loop Hero launched on March 4th, but that didn’t stop me from jumping into the free demo and sinking in quite a few hours prior to receiving my press copy of the full game. Loop Hero costs $14.99 USD on Steam, but is on sale for $12.74 (15% off) until March 11th. Loop Hero doesn’t skip a beat — if you played the demo, you’ll be able to pick up from your previous save file and keep moving through this engaging world.
Recursion and systematic chaos
The brief demo tutorial does little to explain the mechanics or rules of the world, but you’ll soon start to discover how things work as you progress around the circular track again and again — each pass a little different than the last. Learning the world and how the game works on our own terms is half the fun. But there’s plenty that may not be intuitive without continuous experimentation. For players wanting to learn powerful combos and interactions quickly, YouTube will be your friend.
The protagonist of the Loop Hero story is just as in the dark as we are, but he’s committed to helping the inhabitants of this strange and grim world, determined to stop and reverse the Lich’s power that has plunged the world into a dark void. From the Lich’s perspective, it’s an admirable Thanos snap impression.
Each loop of your expedition provides access to more and better loot while also pitting you against increasingly powerful enemies up until you either choose to retreat and save the resources you gathered to upgrade your camp or die trying. It’s recursion built into incremental progression while also giving the player plenty of agency to balance their preferred risk and reward.
Tile cards and camp upgrades enable interesting and layered interactions
Loop Hero can be paused at any time outside of combat, allowing players to switch between Adventuring and Planning mode. When paused in planning mode, players can take all the time they need to think about and preview their tile placement. The tiles you discover while playing are dependent on the deckbuilding mechanic and the cards you chose to bring into the expedition. As you kill monsters, you will continue to draw new tile cards.
For each row of cards, the top number above the circled number represents the maximum number of cards that players can bring in from each row. The bottom number below the circled number represents the minimum. At the bottom of the screen, I see that I can bring anywhere from 7–12 cards from all the rows combined into an expedition. Only cards that are included in my deck will show up in my expeditions away from camp. New cards will gradually be introduced as you craft upgrades to your camp between expeditions.
Placing enemy tiles like the spider cocoon or grove increases the difficulty of combat in certain areas. Passing Go at my camp tile and collecting $200…er a percentage of my total health back, gives better and more predictable access to loot and additional tile cards to paint life into the loop. Passing through different types of enemy tiles (or placing friendly terrain off in the distance) will generate additional resources that can be used after the expedition. Stacks of a base resource will automatically be combined to form a single copy of the next tier up (useful for costlier camp upgrades as you progress.)
In Loop Hero, more danger = more reward. We create the very enemies that we are fighting. If they get out of hand, it’s our own fault.
Different types of cards can be placed in different locations. Some enemy monster cards will directly shape the road of the loop, while others will sit adjacent and off to the side.
With each new expedition of the strangely void world comes an opportunity for more upgrades to the camp itself, creating better benefits for completing the loop in future runs (i.e. being able to more comfortably push forward to harder content thanks to extra healing or new health potions that can help in a pinch.)
If you choose to comfortably retreat from the expedition after completing a loop and ending in your camp, you’ll keep 100% of the resources you gathered. Choosing to panic retreat in the middle of the loop will net you 60% of the resources you gathered throughout the expedition, and dying will only let you keep 30%. As you gather more and more resources, you will gain access to new powers and better benefits from passing your base camp with each loop of the track.
The bar for the boss fight will continue to creep forward as time goes by. Get too greedy, and you won’t be able to complete a full 100% resource loot retreat without the boss jumping in and taking over your camp. You’ll be forced to either face the boss or retreat early with only 60% of your hard-earned treasure. It’s difficult to time, and many times I have found myself unable to complete a loop before the boss spawns due to the complexity I have architected. Fights with monsters and traveling through the loop both serve to progress the boss bar.
Through many expeditions into the darkness, I managed to upgrade my camp with things like a Herbalist’s Hut to give me automatically-triggering health potions that will help give me an extra layer of healing potential out in the wild. My Refuge structure gave me access to a new hero class: The Rogue. And my Smithy gives me some starting gear as I being each expedition — having a starting foundation to build on rather than going in completely unequipped.
The Gymnasium camp upgrade and village tile add elective passive traits as our hero circles around the expedition map, gaining XP. Villages offer a compelling source of flat healing each time you move through them, but the villagers expect payment for giving you such a delectable treat. After passing through a village tile, players will gain a quest that will ‘king’ a random monster on the map, giving it increased damage and health. So far, I’ve found that the powerful healing boost of the village provides more than enough benefit to cover the added danger. Just watch out for the scarecrows if you plant some wheat fields next to your village. They hit harder than a lot of the monsters I have encountered in this world.
Shown above is a great example of a haven for monsters — and loot. Each encounter within this area will contain additional vampires to up the challenge and rewards when moving through this part of my loop.
Different configurations of resource tile placements create new and interesting effects and interactions with the game world. But with some of those increased rewards (for assembling a 3x3 grid of rock and mountain tiles, for example), many also come with an adverse effect. In the case of the previous example, creating the 3x3 rock+mountain grid gives a treasure trove of resources to haul back to home base, but also spawns a powerful harpy enemy on the track loop every two days of game time.
While I am still progressing through the game, I am constantly finding new interactions between my tiles as I continue to experiment and build out new loops. Swamp tiles, for example, make all sources of healing except potions damage both the player and enemy monsters, so putting a vampire manor next to them makes the vampirism health leech of the vampire enemies work against them.
New upgrades in camp provide access to new types of tiles — and new interactions and capabilities with tiles I already have. Everywhere I look, Loop Hero continues to layer more and more beautiful complexity upon itself, like a delicious cake slathered in frosting.
Placing a meadow tile adjacent to any other type of tile creates a blooming meadow, raising the healing per day of each meadow from 2–3. Combining this build with mountains and a chrono crystal gives me more max health and doubles the effect of the healing from my already improved blooming meadows. This type of interaction encourages a high-defense build that relies on burst healing after each passing game day rather than vampirism to leech some health in combat.
Inventory Management — an active mechanic that makes gearing fun and rewards some level of patience
Gearing in Loop Hero is a fun mechanic. Players have 12 item slots in their bag/inventory available. Once all 12 slots are full, players won’t be able to pick up new items from winning fights with monsters without destroying the item in the bottom right socket. But doing this can create its own dilemmas as equipping a new item will permanently destroy whatever was in the slot before. If you delete an item that would have paired well with something else you just picked up — too bad.
Each class of character has certain equipment slots available to them (presumably different slots are available for different classes). As you equip items, the game will destroy any item that was previously in the particular slot. Only the Warrior class was available for the game’s demo, but I quickly unlocked the rogue class in the full game. In multi-opponent fights throughout the loop, you can pause it in real-time to equip new drops in gear slots that you gained mid-fight, sometimes providing a timely power up and less loss of health points.
The game encourages you to keep a full inventory to generate scrap metal resources — something I had to learn after having already played for over an hour. It wasn’t covered in the tutorial anywhere and wasn’t necessarily intuitive. For whatever reason, I played with the impression that our character wouldn’t be able to pick up new items if their inventory was full, so I missed out on a lot of early-game scrap metal in my first hour of Loop Hero.
Just be sure to equip new best-in-slot items as you loot them to avoid accidental deletion later down the line. Items deleted that were previously equipped to your character do not reward scrap metal resources.
If you loot an item when your inventory is full, the game will “burn” an item in your inventory, turning it into scrap metal resources. Thankfully, the system is first in, first out and the game will cycle your newest item gained to the top left slot, making it the last item in your inventory that will be deleted. With card tiles, eventually, if you gather enough tile cards the card furthest to the left will be burned and give you a memory fragment. In the demo at least, there is nothing to spend this resource on in the camp between expeditions.
An RPG through and through
Different types of equipment offer different stats and build mechanics. Choosing and evaluating the opportunity cost of gearing (all while juggling the inventory management system described above) add ANOTHER layer of complexity and interaction.
Prioritizing certain stats based on the state of the game world and the tiles you drafted coming into the expedition gives access to more power. Tile placement and items determine how good or bad certain stats are to prioritize in addition to defensive and offensive stats.
Different Classes offer exciting new lines of play
The Rogue plays much differently than the Warrior who gradually scales in power as the fight progresses. As it turns out, the Rogue has access to different gear slots, and different additional stats that can appear on items.
The Rogue can equip two weapons (but doesn’t have access to the high-defense of the Warrior’s shield slot). From the start, the rogue gets a flat 5% vampirism stat, but can’t obtain vampirism from any other gear drop. Instead, the Rogue relies heavily on defense, and evade (heavily favored on the boot item slot) to stay alive.
Unlike the Warrior who gains items in real-time by killing monsters, the Rogue will instead claim trophies from the monsters he vanquishes and trade them in all at once in the camp for new items. It’s a process that doesn’t allow for the same kind of inventory micro-management as the Warrior. Looting more trophies than I have inventory slots will result in some items getting destroyed automatically, even if they were orange-tier gear.
Instead, I’ve found that prioritizing movement speed through beacon tiles and a monster-light map where I target 12 or fewer trophy pickups per loop gives the most control over my inventory when playing the new character class.
Survivability for the Rogue is challenging at the start, but the class quickly scales in power with new camp upgrades and access to the healing from the village and wheat field.
I wasn’t ready for my first encounter with the Lich
After comfortably progressing through an expedition and summoning the boss by outlasting the world created, I felt prepared for the boss fight. But it was a grave (pun intended) mistake. My encounter with the Lich, despite holding my tile cards to remove terrain/enemies, ended quickly with my death. I will look to upgrade my camp a little more prior to my next encounter with this boss so that I can summon and fight more monsters in each loop.
Fortunately, Loop Hero lets me take the game at my own pace so I can bide my time and gather resources to upgrade my camp prior to facing the boss again.
For $12 and some change with the promo price, Loop Hero is a bargain. I expect to get many, many hours of enjoyment out of this title and am excited for the full release and additional updates that extend beyond the already content-rich game. Don’t be surprised if I’m not the only one raving about this new game — I’m sure you’ll hear plenty about it.
