Loot Rascals is a space-themed, strategy board game that’s got a style of its own.  Your job as a spaceman is to save the robot head of your pal Big Barry from an interdimensional tentacled beast.  But first you must escape from an artificial moon that the beast created.  The game has a look that reminds me of Katamari Damacy with a bit of British humor thrown in.  In fact I think I read they had an Adventure Time animator do some of the art for this game.  Anyway you can download this game on PS4 and PC, but it’s reviewed on PS4 here.

Each map is laid out with hexagonal spaces, like a board game.  The maps are randomly generated, or as the game calls them “procedurally generated,” but I’m not sure what the difference is.  As you walk about the map, it changes from day to night.  Monsters, aliens, and robots also roam about the map for you to fight.  Some will attack first in the day and defend first at night, and vice versa.  You want to try to land on the monsters when they defend first.  When you land on a space with a monster, you’ll trade blows until one of you is defeated.  Sometimes monsters will drop cards.  Equip these cards to increase your attack and defense, as well as give you other abilities.  But you can only hold a limited amount of cards at a time, so you must use strategy to use what you need and what to discard.  Cards can be sent to other players online as well.

There are several different game modes.  You can play the main story, or try daily map challenges or even do a practice map.  Penalties for losing all your hit points are pretty severe, though.  If a monster beats you, you’ll start at the beginning of the map and it’ll randomly generate again.  Plus you’ll lose all your collected cards, so it’s like you’re starting over again.  At the beginning of the map is a dome that acts like your home base.  Here you can trade cards for coins that you can use to regain health, or you can get tips or new cards, among other things.

I had two main problems with this game. One is that the text is way too small and hard to read.  The other is that since I’m not really big into strategy board games, because of the high difficulty of this title, it was hard for me to get into this game either.  But if you do like strategy board and card games, you may want to check this out anyway.

Kid Factor:

Loot Rascals is rated E-10 with an ESRB descriptor of Fantasy Violence.  When you fight monsters, you just punch and kick them until they fall down.  Cutscenes show other acts of cartoon violence as well.  Reading skill is needed for the text, and because of the high difficulty level, I’d say this is best enjoyed by older kids who are accustomed to complicated board and card games.

Tags: Game Reviews