Loot Rascals Reviews

Loot Rascals is bizarre – and not only because the experimental attitude that Hollow Ponds takes in gameplay design. Loot Rascals will take you to a strange but enjoyable place, especially if you consider yourself a "fan of video games" – even if it is only for 15 minutes at a time.

The visuals are lovely, combining bursts of color evocative of Katamari Damacy with all the charm of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, if the Imaginary Friends were all inexplicably out to kill you. Your protagonist, either the male Olimar expy or the dashing eyepatch-wearing female badass, is silent, apart from grunts of pain and war cries accompanying attacks. Bright colors paint the world you are exploring and the distinct day and night versions of the worlds are gorgeous. Terrain and effects are painted with equal attention to detail, and the interface is very clean and allows you to enjoy the random world that you are exploring. Music is very chill, which is completely at odds with the carnage that goes on during gameplay, and you can hear differences in the day and night tracks.

It's hard not to love kooky off-the-wall British humour. Loot Rascals is one of the strangest and funniest games that I've ever played but does it combine turn-based strategy and puzzle elements well or are you better off in the hands of The Thing Below?

Funny, strange, sweet, accessible, as intricate as a Gordian knot with it. Loot Rascals is a smart piece of game design executed with delightful style. Even so, it feels as though the mechanics overwhelm all else - I do think it would benefit from offering more structure and goals in order to then earn the daily-play status it clearly desires.

A little rascal.

Loot Rascals has potential, but the over reliance on luck and a lack of any real progression lets it down some what. I appreciate what Hollow Ponds is attempting to do with the game but without any tangible feedback that you’re improving it can feel like effort and time is being wasted. Still, the gameplay is actually fun, and the on-the-fly strategy aspect utilising cards is a system that has been implemented well. Loot Rascals looks great and plays well, and its style will appeal to some. If you want a game that is challenging, humourous, but very reliant on luck then Loot Rascals is for you.

There have been a lot of permadeath roguelikes released recently. In fact, the only thing more ubiquitous than permadeath roguelikes themselves are tedious and facile declarative sentences about how many permadeath roguelikes have been released recently. This writer should know - he's written a lot of them. They're usually followed by equally tedious and facile declarative sentences about how the particular permadeath roguelike at issue does something to differentiate itself.

Loot Rascals also has a rather frustrating difficulty curve. First off the world maps are fairly large and your goal is to find a teleporter to get to the next area. You generally want to explore as much as possible so that you’re prepared for the next world with a sufficient amount of cards on hand. Time is a factor though since you have a limited amount of turns before some creepy space bugs appear, with ridiculously more powerful versions showing up soon after the first batch. This means you have to race to find that exit which can prove problematic with how large the maps are since you could reach one end of the map, burning through most of that turn counter, and realize the exit was actually on the other side. With cards not dropping very often, this makes you want to go looking for enemies to fight which makes every enemy defeated with no reward another blow and waste of turns off the counter. The game demands that you have good enough cards to tackle the upcoming world, but also telling you to rush to that exit makes its message almost slightly hypocritical. Some worlds even start you with enemies that have triple the power of the previous world’s enemies standing directly outside your spawn point, forcing you to fight them to no avail. The low drop rate for cards and pressure to reach the teleporter before you’re prepared for it can lead to you being severely unprepared for these sort of moments. I’ve had this happen to me so many times it’s shifted from the game being difficult to just plain unfair. In something like FTL or Binding of Isaac when I die I know it was because of an error on my end, but in Loot Rascals most of my deaths felt like the game as actively working against me.

Deceptively deep gameplay and a pitch-perfect style make Loot Rascals a treat to pick up and play, but its over-reliance on luck and its failure to impart a sense of progression make it just as easy to put back down.

It’s also kinda funny that what seemed like a lot to take in sort of feels like second nature at this point. Frustrations eventually giving way toward a playful spite, I was running through the game again and again before I knew it. It’s going to be a long time before I get everything I want out of Loot Rascals, and I’m perfectly fine with that. With Loot Rascals, I feel like I can loot forever. Whether that’s actually true has yet to be proven, but I’m going to have lots of fun figuring it out.