The Loopler

Overall, this is one of the better roguelikes I've played recently. It is mechanically NOTHING like Balatro, but you'll see the comparison a fair amount because it has a similar "sauce" - that addictive bit of developer soul inside a game that makes it something special. Not to mention the soundtrack is immaculate. Absolutely slaughtered that, whoever did the music, specifically the drum track. Games are nice and quick, and you can expect to beat a run in around 12-15 minutes. Plenty of additional content and a very cool take on "Infinite" mode for those who want to go further. My minor gripes are the unlock system does take a significant amount of time to work through, and it does discourage you from using some of the cars you've unlocked due to a lack of items specific for that build. I was also a bit disappointed with the difficulty at lower levels, but it's satisfyingly challenging at later levels (and I've seen other people say it's too challeging in general, so it's likely very well balanced). However, none of this really detracts from the fact that The Loopler, in general, a really well designed, and surprisingly deep game.

You can tell work went into the presentation of this game but it's meaningless when there's no gameplay. You just place down a boost gate, fuel gate, a multiplier and score gates and two gold gates. Congrats, thats it, you win. All the cards are all worthless after the first 2 stages as they are linear bonuses in a game with exponential growth so you don't even have to make a choice like "which card do I keep". Then when you get to the shop - pitstop in this game - you just spam buy everything, reroll, buy everything. Even incremental games have more decision making.

Great fun geame. The infinity mode is a great addition to the demo version.

I think my least favorite roguelite trope of all time is when the debuff that hard-counters exactly one build appears exactly when you're using that build. It seems pretty lazy to, for instance, include both a car that exclusively provides bonuses to the overdrive mechanic and a [potentially] unavoidable boss debuff that disables the overdrive mechanic entirely. I think my second least favorite roguelite trope of all time is how progression is marked by the accumulation of mechanics that would be useful if you could find the one or two items necessary to build around them but ultimately bloat your pool of available run choices, causing those and all other builds to fail more often than they would have previously. For a game genre that revolves around making choices, these tropes make the entire decision-making process feel wholly arbitrary. Anyways this game is still pretty fun

YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! numbers go up, brain goes brrrrrrrrrrrr

Balatro but, like, REALLY fast.

I don't know, the choices seem minor and that really affects the feeling of a roguelike. Nothing feels game-changing