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Jesse Venbrux seems to have a thing for emulating Michael Brough games. 2020's Seven Scrolls was surprisingly novel given how well it worked with a lot of the same basic building blocks of Brough's Imbroglio and P1 Select, but that charm is all but lost on Loopy Wizard, a mini roguelike that not only tries to essentially pull off the same trick again, but does so in a way that feels much more derivative.

Circular spellbook

Loopy Wizard is yet another dungeon-crawler where you control a character by swiping to have them move around on a 5×5 grid. On this adventure, you are a wizard that can blast magic bolts at enemies from any distance, but you can also add special skills to an odd spellbook that forces you to cast them at set intervals according to a clock-like arrow that rotates around the spellbook's spell slots.

Your goal is to earn points by killing monsters and progressing as far through dungeons as possible before dying, which is much easier said than done given the game's quirky spell system. Although it might initially sound neat to pick up the ability to poison creatures, for example, you may run into situations where the only creature available to poison is yourself.

Intricate incantations

There are a few wrinkles to Loopy Wizard's structure and spellbook mechanics that make it a bit more nuanced and replayable than it might otherwise be. This includes things like level progression which reset many of your spells before moving on to the next set of challenging enemies and the ability to drag spells off of your spellbook to activate them off-schedule and remove them from your rotating inventory of powers.

This gives players some additional agency in terms of being able to form strategies for success as opposed to simply having to rely on the randomness of spell drops, while also creating a difficulty curve that prevents you from constantly depending on a particular loadout of abilities that seem to work well together.

Arcane antics

Much like Seven Scrolls, a lot of the appeal of Loopy Wizard is in seeing how effective and wild certain combinations of powers can get while learning to use them to your advantage. The only problem here is a lot of the powers are repeats from the previous game and the circular spellbook isn't as compelling a gameplay hook as the “if/then” logic statements of Seven Scrolls.

It also doesn't help that Loopy Wizard is yet another very obvious riff on Brough's games. Even if it was the most successful and innovative approach to this kind of game (which–to be clear–it is not), producing two titles back-to-back that so closely resemble another creator's work doesn't feel like homage so much as it does imitation, and it would've been nice to at least see some more departures from Brough's specific game formula, even if it was just at the surface level (i.e. visual style).

The bottom line

Loopy Wizard is a neat little Brough-like roguelike, but it's not particularly innovative, nor do its new twists prove to be more compelling than those of the titles it's imitating. They are just different, and barely so. Depending on who you are, you could pick up Loopy Wizard and have a grand time. It's more single-screen dungeon-crawling with crude art and a wacky ability gimmick, and either you are happy with minor variations on that familiar formula or you ask for more. I'm sure at this point in the review you know where I stand.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/loopy-wizard-review/

Just like its name sounds like a hodgepodge of gaming terms, Rocket Bot Royale is a similar mashup of genres and mechanics where players parachute tanks into an arena and fight to be the last one standing. The result is a frantic little multiplayer game that is fun to play with casually but would be more fun if it wasn't so aggressively monetized and its matches lasted a tad longer.

Worms-meets-PUBG

Rocket Bot Royale is a multiplayer battle royale game where every player controls a tank. At the start of each match, 25 live players parachute off of a helicopter onto a battlefield where they can then proceed to arc rocket shots to hit other players, kill bot tanks, and even blast their own tank to jump around to other parts of the map.

The goal of each match is simply to be the last tank alive. In addition to destroying other tanks to better your chances, you also have to constantly pay attention to the rising ooze that slowly overtakes the arena. Any tanks that aren't able to stay above this hazard get automatically eliminated.

Platform and pulverize

There's a lot to pay attention to in any given Rocket Bot Royale, but even some of the longest matches don't take more than a minute or two. In that time, you need to manage your positioning, destroy bots, look for crate drops, platform, and even destroy bits of the environment to give you better positioning against your enemies.

The tanks in Rocket Bot Royale aren't particularly sturdy, so you need to avoid enemy fire at all costs. Luckily, your tank is surprisingly good at rocket jumping and sticking to any surface, even when completely upside-down. These dynamics create potential for some really wild highlight moments of destroying tanks in mid-air or flipping out of the way of enemy salvos, but these feats will most likely happen by accident unless you invest a lot of time mastering the game.

Military industrial complex

There are a few minor quirks with Rocket Bot Royale, like its strange default controls that don't get completely fixed by turning on the slingshot aiming function, but all of these pale in comparison to the game's true problem: how it is monetized.

There are a lot of very familiar free-to-play mechanics present in Rocket Bot Royale, like a battle pass, premium skins, etc., but there are also systems in place that intentionally place players on unequal footing in matches. Prior to every round, players can spend coins on special weapons to bring with them, and your menu of choices increases the more you level up your account. If you don't engage with this system, you're almost always at a disadvantage when entering a match. The game drops crates that anyone can collect to gear up, but matches don't really last long enough for a looting phase to feel like something you can feasibly rely on.

The bottom line

There are a lot of ideas happening in Rocket Bot Royale, and most of them are pretty compelling and enjoyable. The only problem is many of these ideas are so thoroughly smothered by the game's monetization systems and blisteringly fast match length that none of them feel like they get room to breathe and realize their full potential.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/rocket-bot-royale-review/