Loop Hero is a bit of a tricky game, which can make it difficult to break through. It’s also great, though, so it’s absolutely worth learning its rules and making them work for you to keep pushing to the very end. There are several acts to the game and throughout them you’ll probably make countless loops, both good and bad. So in order to help you out here are some beginner tips.
Meadows Are Your Best Friends, So Grow Them
One of the early things to understand about Loop Hero’s cards and tiles is that they interact with each other a ton. It’s one of the things we most love about the game. One of the simplest and constantly rewarding interactions is that placing your meadows next to almost any other tile will make them bloom. On their own, meadows restore 2 HP after every day, and they stack. Blooming meadows will net you an extra point of HP per meadow, which will really add up when you’re on a later loop and the sheer number of enemies comes close to overwhelming your health.
Take Your Time Placing Enemies
Speaking of enemies, a thing that took me forever to get is that you should take your time placing enemies on the map. Instead of dropping them the second you get them, hold onto them and even let them expire if you need to. Taking the early loops as slow as possible might not be the most fun, but it ensures you aren’t low on health during later loops and can continue having fun with the game—and, you know, hopefully beat it. Beating the game is probably why you’re looking this up so I’m assuming that’s the goal you’ve got in mind.
Don’t Radically Change Your Deck
As you gather resources and spend them on upgrades and structures at camp, you will unlock completely new cards to swap in and out of your existing deck. You have a limit to how many cards you can have, so you will have to exchange things you’re comfortable with for cards you’re not as familiar with. By and large, these additional cards up the difficulty, so they’re best saved for future challenge runs. If you really want to play with them immediately though, introduce them to your deck one at a time.
Vampirism Is Overrated
Vampirism might be the coolest sounding stat, but it’s also one of the most harmful ones. It’s a life drain stat but it only drains life if you attack something and land a hit, and even then the return can be very minimal. Your hero character is squishy (so weak) and could thus benefit from two other stats much more: evasion and regen per sec. It’s hard to regain HP on a loop and so having a passive that recovers it both in and out of fights will be key, while evasion will help you hold onto that health to begin with. Evasion also comes in handy when you are swamped by mobs like ratwolves or goblins, which not only hit hard but hit fast. It’ll especially help with longer fights against bosses.
Quality Over Quantity
Speaking of stats, one of the funner classes, the Necromancer, can summon skeletons to fight for them and has an entirely different set of stats to the Warrior and Rogue concerning their skeletons. Namely, they can raise the quality of the skeleton, their strength and how many they can summon at a time. The beginning skeletons are really flimsy and weak, but if you raise the quality of them, you can summon not only cooler looking skeletons but ones that boast different weapons and more power, which will come in handy way more than siccing a mob of ragtag bone warriors at something. Invest in this to quash all beefs with the utmost speed.
Stack Your Road Lanterns
Look, some of the text is a little small so I forgive you for not reading it too well, but stack your road lanterns. They ward off enemy spawns on adjacent tiles and their effects do stack, so if you do happen to have a lot of traffic, putting one on either side of a particularly busy lane will do wonders for your spawn rates and peace of mind.
Send Goblins to Oblivion
There’s a really powerful card named Oblivion which erases whatever is on the tile you drop it on. This means that you probably want to hold onto it and use it sparingly. I’m here to tell you the best early use of this is on goblins or goblin camps, which spawn after you place 10 rocks or mountains. Goblins spawn quickly, attack even quicker and are absolutely run killers if you’re not prepared for them. That’s why you are best served by either erasing the goblins and clearing the path till you can be better prepared, or erasing the goblin camp altogether to make sure they don’t spawn at all. There are tons of other mobs you can get good loot from that are far more manageable.
Retreat and Build Your Camp At First
Your focus at first should be building up your camp, not beating the acts of the game. Dying causes you to lose everything but 30% of the resources you collected. Retreating at any tile but your campfire nets you 60%, and retreating at the campfire gets you everything. Make scavenger runs and get out of dodge to build structures that you will absolutely need to beat the game. An herbalist hut, for example, gives you potions that regenerate health below a certain threshold. A smithy starts you with warrior’s gear, and upgrading them allows you to start with gear tailored to whichever of the classes you pick. You can unlock your XP bar with one of these structures, which gives you skills mid-loop that are essential to surviving. You can even set up watchtowers that provide friendly fire while you’re looping. I cannot stress how important it is to build up your camp in order to survive the perils of Loop Hero. You can’t control your character but you can control everything around them like this, so absolutely do so.
That’s all I’ve got for beginning tips for Loop Hero without giving away all the secrets the game has in store for you. The rest is up to you all to discover, and hopefully you now stand a bit of a better chance to see it all!
Moises Taveras is an intern for Paste Magazine and the managing editor of his college newspaper, the Brooklyn College Vanguard. He was that one kid who was really excited about Google+ and is still sad about how that turned out.