Loot Frog

Looking for a game that perfectly balances incremental hallmarks with action gameplay? Where skillful play allows you to get just a little ahead in the skill tree? How about a satisfying loop, where upgrades feel meaningful and the engaging gameplay staves off a bit of the tedium and repetition inherent to the genre (which, to be fair, is the reason those of us looking to their brains off love it).

Well, keep looking. I’d been keeping an eye on this one since one of the recent Nextfest demos; I’ll be honest, I’d practically been counting down the days. Now, even having played that demo, I knew this was nothing revolutionary, but it appeared, at least, to be an action-incremental that captured some of the charm of the best in the genre, like Shelldiver, or the overlooked, absolutely fantastic Ignoble. And, for the first few stages, it pretty much is that. It doesn’t really rise much above competency, even in its finest moments, but it doesn’t really need to; the constituent elements are pure dopamine, reduced to its simplest, and often most addictive, form.

Where you’ll feel Loot Frog going astray first is the need to repeat stages, even early on, for the meagerest rewards. A bit of grinding is inherent to the genre, but in the best games of this ilk, it will be rewarded with breakthrough moments where you momentarily feel broken, finally push through the wall you’ve been grinding against, and continue the loop, the stakes raised but your power having raised commensurately alongside them.

And this is where Loot Frog’s biggest problem comes in. You’ll often need to max out the available skill tree around the third or fourth of those stages just to squeeze by–but you won’t feel empowered, gratified, or even like you’re having much fun, Chances are, even on Normal, you’ll be more likely to feel frustrated at realizing that this is, at the end of a day, much more of a bullet hell than anything else. Which is an absolutely fine thing for a game to be, but not when its welded to a poor incremental, that has you grinding the same stages over and over, just to have a hope of executing the near-perfect play it requires to complete a stage by the halfway point of the game.

What you’re left is with a game that has all the tedium of an incremental, with none of the joys, and waves and waves of bullets piled on top. Credit where credit is due, the art is pretty good, it controls well, and the bullet patterns are well-designed and occasionally fun to dodge. But, even if you do manage to dodge them and manage some counterattacks, you’ll do only piddling damage. Boss battles stretch to the ~5 minute mark, and you’ll use all the tools available to you to chip away at the boss’ massive health bar–very, very slowly, and very, very unsatisfyingly.

Can it be fixed? Yeah, to some extent, probably, since the most glaring of its issues are in its balance. Would those fixes make this a stand-out in the genre? Not really, but it might make it one worth recommending.