Heroes of Loot

This game sucks.  Okay, so I've been playing it a lot lately and I guess I'm having fun doing so, but really, it kind of sucks.

Heroes of Loot is a gauntlet-like with randomized levels.  People like to call everything with "permadeath" a rogue-like these days, but let's face it, back in the day *every* game had permadeath.  And aside from randomized dungeons this game has nothing to do with rogue.  By contrast, choosing whether you want to play the warrior, the elf, the wizard or the valkyrie and then entering the top-down-view dungeon and throwing your weapon at eveything you see is a lot like Gauntlet.  There are no monster generators and your health doesn't count down over time, but it's only like Gauntlet, it isn't actually Gauntlet.

You go through the dungeon killing things and collecting coins which you can spend at shops that appear one-per-floor unless there is a quest instead.  One of the monsters has a key which opens the door to the next level.  You can get a small number of items like a shield that gives you an ablative health bar, a cloak that makes you temporarily invisible and a regeneration potion that permanently allows you to recover health over time.

Yeah, how about that last one, eh?  Your health comes back *fast*, by the way.  This game is two games.  There is the game of no regeneration potion where you try as hard as you can to survive but ultimately die trying to fight your way into a room full of shooting attackers from a narrow hall.  Then there is the game of regeneration potion where eventually you die because you stopped paying attention when a minotaur spawned on top of you.  There is a cup of life which allows you to regain full life by standing next to a well for a while once per level that has a well.  It costs 399 and heals you to full every now and then, the regeneration potion costs 200 and heals you to full repeatedly every floor of the dungeon.  There is also the lens of secrets that allows you to see secret rooms.

About those secret rooms.  They have nine spaces each with a treasure on them.  The treasures regularly include a cloak and very frequently include a regeneration potion.  As far as I can tell there is no way to detect them by the appearance of the dungeon except in certain lighting so you basically get to run around every level of the dungeon looking for the hole in the wall that gets you your regeneration potion so you can be invincible.  Then when you get the lens of secrets you spend half the game basically invulnerable as well as invisible.

Except for the minotaurs will kill you in less than a second if you stand near them and sometimes spawn out of nowhere, so you have to constantly pay attention.

There are five classes, including the unlockable barbarian, which all basically play
the same.  Some classes have more strength but they appear to attack slower so its barely a noticeable difference.  Some classes have more magic but magic is pretty lame in any event since you can't die anyway and magic doesn't stop those minotaurs from appearing on you or help you react quickly to them.  Some classes need more or less experience to go up a level but after a few levels the only way to go up a level anymore is to get an experience scroll which puts you exactly up the next level - rather than say, giving you some fixed amount of experience.  Theoretically you could go up levels by killing monsters but you find enough scrolls that any progress you make towards a level will be wiped out before you get there unless you specifically avoid taking the scrolls.

After unlocking all the features of the dungeon, none of which make much of a difference at all, you get the ability to collect collection items.  And when you get six for the same class you get to start one level higher with that class!  This doesn't really mean anything.  It appears you can only collect one such item per playthrough since I almost always get one by dungeon level 10 or so and didn't get another by dungeon level 56.

So nothing in this game really means anything.  That's fine since you are just going through a dungeon killing things.  I'd just rather you started with the regeneration potion so I didn't have to hunt secret rooms every time I started a new game.

Alternatively I wish that playing well mattered, that there were real differences between the classes, and that there were more than three items that affected your game - more than two really since the cup of life doesn't change anything.  Oh well, I'll probably keep playing it anyway.