Luck & Loot Review

 Luck & Loot is a dice-based, dungeon-crawling roguelite developed by SMARTcreative and published by GrabTheGames. In this game, you’ll be rolling dice to fight and risking your life with every encounter in order to make it through the Dark Keep and defeat the big bad at the end. I do prefer playing with cards to dice, but this seemed interesting enough on the surface to look into it further.

Upon firing up the game, I was met with a couple of options to change how it looks. It goes for an 8-bit style, making it look like you’re playing an old Atari title on a CRT TV. You can even change the colours to be monochrome or shades of green if you want to recreate gaming at home in the ‘70s. You can change the text to normal or Dyslexia fonts if you can't read pixels and reduce the CRT effect if it hurts your eyes too much at any time, which is nice to have, but I did like the default aesthetic.

Now, let’s get into the gameplay. After you’ve chosen one of three heroes (a Warrior, a Ranger, or a Wizard), you’ll start your run with a little bit of witty dialogue (which doesn’t repeat, thank god), then face your first set of enemies. Luck & Loot plays with a turn-based battle system where dice determine the flow of combat. Every turn of combat plays out by having the enemy roll first so you can see what they’re going to do, before it’s your turn to roll to determine what dice skills you can use against them. Dice skills allow you to attack, defend, heal, and inflict all sorts of status effects, but if you don’t like what you got (or you end up rolling nothing but blanks), you can reroll all the empty faces or your entire hand twice before it's locked in. Repeat until either you win or die trying.

The only consistently available move is your Ultimate skill, which varies from character to character. It doesn’t rely on a dice roll, and you can use it at any time in combat. However, it has a cooldown based on the number of rooms you’ve cleared, so there better be a good reason to use it. Once you’ve spent all your dice or chosen to pass, the enemy attacks before you go again. It's a nice and simple combat system that’s easy to grasp, but has its complexities when deciding what you should do with the rolls you’re given. 

Outside of combat, you’ll encounter various events and visit merchants to improve your dice or obtain relics with passive but game-changing buffs. You can change out what dice skills you can roll, with stronger skills taking up more capacity than others, and sacrifice old skills to unlock perks for that die.

There are some real interesting events, balancing between risk and reward, like with the Obelisk encounters. If you can take them down under their turn limit, it upgrades your Ultimate. If you can’t, you can reduce your max HP to get one more turn to take it down. You can also end up getting Curses, which are permanent dice skills you can’t remove and proc every time they’re rolled, and it’s often in exchange for something massively beneficial. You’re constantly pressing your luck with each event, and those who do are handsomely rewarded… or severely punished for their hubris.

Plus, playing it safe isn’t exactly an option. If a battle lasts more than eight rounds, you’ll be inflicted with Fatigue and suffer different negative effects every turn. It’s not a death sentence, but it definitely makes your life more difficult. Given the increasing strength of enemies the further you go, you better make sure all your dice are up to snuff.

Failure is inevitable, though, and eventually your luck will run out. However, victory and defeat go hand in hand when it comes to progression. Throughout your run, you’ll be earning points (gained by looting and killing), which are used to level up your hero, so win or lose, you’re still coming out with something. The more you play, the more you unlock better dice skills, perks, and improve your starting health and armour to make the next run a little easier. Through these upgrades, it’s only a matter of time before you beat your first run, although I did make it pretty far with the Ranger in my first shot, though, so maybe you can beat it without any.

There is quite a bit of replay value, too. Two of the heroes are locked until you reach the Dark Keep with the previous character, which isn’t that big of a hassle, but the real meat comes when you beat your first run with that character and Ascend. This will unlock a bunch of difficulty modifiers to make your runs harder, like replacing some initial dice skills with blanks, reducing your starting money leaving you Broke AF (that's literally what it's called), or simply increasing enemy health. There are a surprising number of them that sound like torture to turn on, and if you want to take on the final boss, you’ll need to activate at least some of them. Pick your poison and hope it goes down smoothly.

Luck & Loot is an enjoyable adventure. It makes customising your dice and rolling them satisfying, and I kept coming back for more, even if I was getting completely screwed over with bad rolls. That only made me rethink how I build my dice and go again. It might be a little lacking in content compared to other titles within its price range and/or genre, but for such a small game, it packs quite a punch.