Loot River

In recent years, the independent developer has been creative with roguelike action games, games that take advantage of the auto-generation feature and where you progress and unlock new abilities and weapons while trying to complete the game, but with the return set to zero upon death to begin the journey again, but with the ability to achieve… What weapons and abilities you have revealed are subject to certain conditions. Games in this genre have had a number of impressive releases, perhaps the most famous of which are Dead Cells and Hades. Today we will discuss another game of this type that stands out with some of its own ideas, namely Loot River. So how did it compare to the other experiences?

Loot River presents a simple story to justify the events. You try to get through the maze consisting of several floors to break the continuous cycle of life and death, which ends with the characters losing their minds and turning into monsters that wander around the maze. The game’s graphics come with a Mixture of pixels and 3D designs to us, and the result looks strange but beautiful at the same time. Time, especially considering effects like the movement of water around platforms as they move, the game also features a lot of good tunes.

The game system is very simple, with a button for quick and heavy attacks, a final button for dodge, a button for blocking and two buttons for magical abilities, as well as a button for filling up the life bar with your ability to carry two weapons between which you can choose by pressing the last button. The interesting thing about the game is that the maze consists of platforms in the shape of Tetris cubes that you move and experience using the right analog stick. The bird’s eye view experience ensures smooth and practical controls without having to switch between moving the Platforming and controlling your character can feel distracted.

The idea of ​​controlling platforms gives you more options to deal with enemies. You can perform a heavy attack away from the enemies and then quickly attach your platform to their platform to attack, then retreat and repeat the process. You can also use platforms to isolate some of the stronger enemies from the less powerful enemies and eliminate them one by one. This idea allows you to escape and quickly rethink your plan when a dilemma arises, or simply avoid annoying enemies.

As you defeat enemies, your character’s level increases, providing you with a development ability that can be invested in various aspects, such as the health bar or the ability to use weapons and other aspects. As you move through the labyrinth, you will find some treasures that contain weapons or rings that can be used to increase the character’s level without developing them. But the game doesn’t reward you for exploration in the way you want. Often you’ll have to explore the maze and defeat a group of enemies in an environment that’s hard to narrow down or difficult to move around, only to find that the weapon you get isn’t worth the effort. As you explore, you’ll get gold that you can use to buy rings and medals. You also gain knowledge points that can be used to acquire new weapons and magical abilities when moving between different levels of the labyrinth.

Despite the interesting idea that the game presents, it has many flaws that prevent it from providing the required fun, since moving your character is relatively difficult even after developing certain aspects, and the combat experience is primitive and not very is entertaining. and some elements of the experience do not work as intended. You can say that it is “broken”. Often times your character will get stuck in place while dodging, causing you to take damage. The blocking mechanic is used at the last moment to make a strong counterattack against the opponent, but this mechanic does not work as expected because your character applies it slowly and annoyingly in exchange for quick attacks. From many enemies, making their use an irrational risk. The range of attacks of some enemies is also strangely large. You can move away from the enemy or even step behind them after dodging, but you will take damage. There are some enemies whose attacks are almost impossible to avoid!

The game still needs further balancing and improvement on the mechanics we mentioned. Our review is based on the game after it received an update that significantly improved the gaming experience, as before this update it was so bad that we doubted our desire to complete the review! The game’s boss encounters could also have been more innovative, as confronting one of these encounters was entertaining, while the rest of the encounters were more similar to confronting a normal enemy, albeit with a larger health bar.

It only took a few tries to complete the game. We played through it for the first time in 4 hours. It can be said that reaching the final boss takes about an hour. Of course, the value of genre games lies in their replayability, and after beating the game for the first time there will be more areas available to explore, but the downsides are: We mentioned it and we quickly became bored with the experience. Even the desire to reveal all weapons and magical abilities was not there. The primitiveness of the gaming experience makes it possible to complete the game with any weapon. Additionally, most magical abilities were of no significant use due to some annoying conditions associated with them. Loot River has the potential. To offer a special experience among players games of the different genre, but it still needs a lot of balancing and adjustments to some of its aspects. The game makes you feel like an incomplete product with many flaws that make the start of a new cycle unlikely.