Heroes of Loot Review

Heroes of Loot is a pixelated rogue-like dungeon crawler game where your goal is to achieve the deepest randomly generated dungeon you can. With random quests, random enemies you will never know what to expect!

Acid means you are rocking!

As typical from rogue-likes, you get only one life. You can choose between 5 characters and your attacks are automatically aimed (you can manually aim with the mouse). As you kill creatures you will level up, gaining more health and increased damage. Beware that the deeper the dungeon the stronger the enemies. As the name says you will be picking an extraordinary amount of loot, of which mostly are coins and gems whose primary goal is to increase your score. Yet the game lacks a local scoring system, despite keeping tracking of it. You can find the global leaderboards here.

Random God knows no fairness!

There are two forms of progression during your run: Moving deeper into the dungeon and leveling up your character. Both can also be increased permanently by finding a Medallion of Time and six Pieces of Equipment, respectively. You can only find one item of each per run. Unfortunately pacing of the game also lack some balance, either being too hard or too easy. Getting the Medallion of Time actually makes the game harder since your character level do not scale at the same pace. And Shiny Loot God forbid you wanting to change to a character that has not leveled up after picking up a couple medallions! You are in for a slow grind.

Despite its problems Heroes of Loot is an interesting title that shows how simple procedural dungeons with few enemy types and some cool magic can make for a big challenge! Due to it simplicity it is also a great game for playing co-op.

Can you beat our top score?

PS1: Our tests show that you get your first six pieces of equipment (for each character) at dungeons 1~5, the next six at 6~9, and so forth. The first Medallion of Time can be found on dungeons 20~30, the second 30~40 and so forth.

PS2: The default controller was no good, so we adapted and published our setup under Heroes of Loot (MekEye v1.0). Use X or the Left Grip to attack.

Scores are gone!

We have been thinking for a while on why we review games and what our intention in scoring them is. What makes a game 10? What makes a game 7? What would make a game 1? Would we even play a game that scored 1?

So we took a step back to consider our score goal. We want to be objective, giving our readers a direct way to compare how successful a game is in implementing its mechanics. But how can we compare a two year game made by 2~3 people in a 50k budget against a four year project made by over 200 people and hundreds of millions of money to back them up? How objective can we be without taking that into consideration? How about playing games from 10 or 20 years ago, like we did with Half-Life. Game design changed since then, but is the game not worth playing? So instead of looking for an Ultimate Budget/Quality/Release formula let us look into what makes us play the game in the first place: It looks interesting.

That means we are playing games because they already have something unique. In this two years, how many games have we reviewed not worthy of being played? In this two years, we reviewed 23 games, of which 30% were scored 10, all the rest were 7 or more. No matter how simple or small a game is, we are not going to pick something that doesn't look, say or read minimally interesting. Therefore we are probably never going to score anything 5 or bellow.

Pointing out how a game can be better doesn't mean the game is not worthy of playing. The same way that not pointing out anything doesn't mean the game has no flaws! Heck, we just made a huge Fallout 4 review and barely pointed out the many flaws in the game... Why? Because there is too much good stuff going on to focus on the bad!

So from 2017 forward we are no longer scoring games. If a game has amazing art, music, graphics or whatever, rest assured we will mention it. =)

Happy New Year and we wish you a 2017 full of many adventures!