Developed by straka.studio and published by themselves and SUPERHOT PRESENTS, this title brings us a roguelike experience with an interesting detail: we can move the platforms we’re standing on.
LOOT RIVER It is available on PC and Xbox One.
FUN PLATFORMS
The strong point and grace of this game, if you saw a trailer you will already know, is that we can move the platforms on which we stand. Almost the entire floor of the maps is water and we move on platforms with the right control stick. This makes Loot River feel unique, it is the different proposal that it offers us.
In each section there is at least one puzzle part in which to advance we will have to move the platforms in a certain order. These puzzles are not difficult, but they are usually fun only the first time they touch us, by the twenty-ninth run we all know them and they feel like wasting a little more time to advance. The good thing is that they add things that keep the platform interesting, such as elevations, for example. It doesn’t help that each area or level is extremely extensive and labyrinthine, we almost always go around the fart a lot.
We have a hub area, the Sanctuary, where various NPCs will offer buffs between each run and whenever we have; the chance to come back in the middle of them. There is one NPC that can enable pretty strong modifiers that apply big changes to the world, but that generally (not all) come with some sort of downside. Throughout our adventure we are going to find these characters in the dungeon, when we talk to them they return to the sanctuary. These are going to offer us new weapons, new spells and new armor and helmets. All separately and at a very high cost. But we need them to become stronger.
A DANGEROUS RIVER
The setting of the game has clear Lovecraftian inspirations and references, combined with mechanics and combat inspired by the Souls saga (there is also part of the story inspired by this). The end result is something quite common to see lately. It’s not a bad thing but it’s not as innovative as the platform system either.
The combat is soulful and quite simple in everything, it’s like an isometric soulslike. Most of the enemies are easily defeated with normal hits. We have at our disposal a dash that allows us to dodge and create distance with enemies, and a parry that, with good timing, allows us to block attacks and counterattack. The timing of the parry feels inconsistent, and also the window to do it is tied to one of our attributes, it was that inconsistency that took away my incentive to invest in that stat when leveling up.
As we kill opponents we will gain experience and level up, just for that run. Each level allows us to increase an attribute point, and honestly, except for vitality, I did not feel that the rest made much of a difference in damage or other types of benefits.
We can carry two weapons, an armor and a helmet. Throughout the runs the enemies will drop this equipment, and we can also find it in chests or buy it with gold from some NPCs inside the dungeon. We also have 3 slots for amulets with different effects.
Although the game has a pixelart style, almost everything we see are 3D models, it seems that with a filter that pixelates them on top. This looks very nice and is much faster and cheaper than drawing the sprites one by one, but in return it makes it not as polished as it should be. This is very noticeable in combat, at times the animations are difficult to understand and makes the attacks of our enemies not seem so well telegraphed. In addition, the damage that the enemies do could be better balanced, there are totally ignorant enemies in every area, we can stand still and they will take years to kill us, while others kill us in three hits. The hitboxes are not very understandable, sometimes the enemy hit passes through our character and we do not take damage, and other times we take free damage being far from where they hit. They would need some polishing.
The bosses are fearsome and huge, they are very intimidating the first time we cross them. The problem is that their AI is very basic. They seem programmed to make few attacks, and what determines which one they use is how far away we are. So if we keep a certain distance constantly, the boss will repeat the same attack every time. This takes away a lot of difficulty and immersion from the experience if we find an attack that is easy to dodge.
While I was writing this review, a patch was released that changed and improved some things, I think it’s good to mention them: On the day of release, the dash we used to dodge lacked animation. We pressed the button and the character magically appeared at a short distance, as if teleporting, this short distance did not serve to dodge almost anything. With the new patch now the dash has an animation, it’s longer, it has a better cooldown and it gives us some frames of invincibility. In addition to this, our character was getting stuck a lot on the corners of platforms, this was also fixed, although it still happens sometimes.
I mention this because the experience of playing from the day the game came out to what it was after the patch was abysmal. The game still feels like early access in some ways, but it was more noticeable before.
Another issue that makes a lot of noise: because it is a game called LOOT River, the “loot” aspect is quite weak. Throughout the runs we don’t collect as much loot as we imagined with the premise that builds us, and we end up biting our hearts with what we have instead of having good options. We start with a limited number of potions, and to reach the end we will need to leave some to an alchemist NPC, who duplicates them when he returns to the sanctuary between areas. It is risking a lot, because the potions that we leave him will be useful later, but we will be able to heal less in the meantime. It’s a high-risk, high-reward mechanic that might work better, if avoiding damage and not using potions through the early areas wasn’t the only way to get to the later areas with enough potions.
THE BAD MILK RIVER
Every time we die we go back to lvl 1, and lose a lot of our currencies. The issue of currencies is a problemón. I understand and respect the design decision of the developers, which seems to point to a much more old school, repetitive and difficult roguelike style. But in the year of our Lord 2022 these are things that I and much of the playerbase no longer resonate with. I’m going to end up saying this in every roguelike review I do because it never seems to stop being relevant: Hades set the bar VERY high for the genre. One of his virtues was that the progression was constant and the frustration factor was minimal. It is something that in the future they should imitate in the genre if they want to live up to it. With this I am not saying that they cannot do something better or something different, but when something is so revolutionary in a medium, it is felt when making comparisons.
In the case of Loot River, it feels like it might not have been a roguelike necessarily, or having fewer elements of the genre would have made the experience less frustrating. Going back to the fact that we lose almost all the currency “Knowledge” when we die, it is something very bad milk, since it is necessary for all the upgrades of the game, most of the runs feel like we did not make any progress. What’s more, if we die in the first areas, we can lose what little we had and end up with even fewer resources. Which is frustrating in the long run, the addictive thing about a roguelike is that each run makes you feel like you’ve advanced, even if it’s just that little bit more, whether it’s going further, or improving or unlocking something that allows you to feel progress or become stronger . In other words, one literally does a run to gather resources and in the long run improve little by little, it is vicious to fart to lose what we need to advance little by little. It’s rough, you feel the opposite of progressing, a bad run can cost you having to do 3 or more runs to recover what you lost. To make matters worse, the most common thing is to have repetitive, long runs, and that in the end they leave us without wanting to do another one. Losses feel hopeless, and the technically weak mechanics make most deaths feel undeserved.
A solution to this loss of resources is to return to the sanctuary to use currencies when we already see that we have little life and potions left. Most of the upgrades we are going to have to buy them like this. But this often means going back through the levels and losing a lot of time, or risking reaching the next level, often having to put ourselves in more danger. It really feels like the game wants you to put in more hours than necessary, without giving you the proper fun and reward in return, at a time when most of the players of these titles are adults without much free time or patience. . Already with a patch they greatly improved the gaming experience, so I hope they continue to read feedback from players to improve it.
System Requirements
MINIMUM: OS: Windows 7 or higher – Processor: Intel i5 or higher – Memory: 4 GB RAM – Graphics: GeForce GT 650M or higher – DirectX: Version 10 – Storage: 3 GB available space
RECOMMENDED: OS: Windows 10 – Processor: Intel i5 or higher – Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GT 650M or higher – DirectX: Version 11 – Storage: 3 GB available space