Loop Dungeon: Idle RPG

I can’t state enough good things about this game. It’s simple, incredibly deep, and doesn’t demand your time. Part Roguelite, Part Loot Grinder, Part Auto Chess, it’s literally a perfect IOS game. This isn’t an active play game, it simulates battles climbing to floor 100 while you’re away, you choose your characters randomly as you hit different floors, those characters are modified by perks allowing you to build a hero differently run to run. It is about team building, synergy, and gear. Upgrade systems are enough to give you control of how you play but simple in that there aren’t 300 currencies and 19 stores to buy things from. Best of all - Can’t really “whale” it. Dolphins get a decent leg up, but everyone is on a mostly equal playing field where time played matters most. Free to play absolutely can compete spenders. I hop gacha to gacha and game to game every month. This one will quite literally never leave my phone.

Overall I love this mix of AFK Arena and Torchlight II; those are two of my favorite games. The one element I din’t care for is equipment being tied to floor level, as when you start the tower over you have to reset your equipment. Tying equipment to the rebirth/upgrade mechanic would be better. Having to swap equipment every level in what is supposed to be a semi-afk game doesnt make sense to me. Once a character is able to equip something, they shouldn’t oater be temporarily unable to. By contrast, making some equipment dependent on upgrade status still accomplishes some gating without requiring excessive micromanagement.

Don’t get me wrong, as far as idle games go, this one does a great job of making you feel like you don’t need to constantly babysit your entire team. They can run amok and blast their way through a dungeon with very little help from you. However, what kills this for me, and it really really does, is the abysmal inventory management. Gear is essential to being successful in dungeons, and even more essential in PvP, yet each piece of gear is restricted by both attribute and dungeon Floor. So every time you start a new dungeon, your heroes will not be able to use any of the gear they are wearing from the previous dungeon. So you spend the entirety of your time digging through your inventory to outfit them with appropriate gear. Gear can’t be shared by heroes so you’re constantly moving the good stuff between them. Your inventory fills up so quickly that at the end of every dungeon you have to dump 20+ items to continue forward. That wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t feel like you needed to keep items with various floor restrictions so your heroes always have gear. Then there’s PvP. The arena you can only access while you are in a dungeon, but it doesn’t count your gear separately in PvP and PVE. So if someone is using a piece of gear in the dungeon, you can’t use it for someone else in PvP. And if you don’t outfit your PvP team with the best possible gear, good luck ever winning a match. It’s an absolute chore to manage equipment and if you want to increase inventory space you’ll spend $20 minimum. This alone has drained my desire to continue playing.