Why hello there my little turtle doves, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I know you’ve missed me…Of course you have, why wouldn’t you?! Well, I’m back to re-visit a game I reviewed last year… And yes, it is Early Access!! It was then, and still is, so lets see how that game has progressed since we last took a stab at it!

…But before we do if you didn’t read the first review check out out now to get caught up: Looterkings – Early Access Review

For those who decided to skip reading the previous review, I’ll give you a bit of insight in to Looterkings; a TLDR of sorts: It’s a procedurally generated dungeon crawler, in which you must fight your way to the top of a sprawling labyrinth of caverns until you reach the hallowed halls of the legendary Elven Queen. Along the way you must survive hordes of creatures that want nothing more in life than to kill you, rip you limb from limb, and make you writhe in pain – Plain and simple! Along with this, you must collect some of that sweet, sweet booty…Uh…I mean treasure; which can be used to purchase upgrades for your weapons and armour, which will be needed as you start off in the nude. I’m entirely serious – My goblin wang was swinging free all over the place, Conan Exiles-style.

Ok, now we got that out the way, let’s see how the game has progressed over these passed months…Well…I’m sorry to say if I’m honest, not a huge amount – They have now implemented the first boss fight on the fifth level, and a reward card system, but these to me are minor things in the grand scheme of things… I really had high hopes for this game, and well, I still do, really! The actual gameplay after a while just gets boring, however – The difficulty curve is non-existent, especially if you want to just play 1 player you essentially have no chance of progressing due to the harsh difficulty.

The loot system is still terrible and screws you from the get go, as in the previous review I mentioned how the loot is sparse so upgrading your armour and weapons is stupidly difficult, and from a game called Looterkings, you would expect a good amount of loot and enjoy getting as much as you can to upgrade your arsenal…It just makes the game too difficult. I wouldn’t mind it if it was the same vein as Dark Souls teaching – Difficult in the way of actual fair deaths, with you learning from your mistakes, but as this game is procedurally generated you don’t really come across the same challenges often enough to truely learn.

The game does have some neat ideas, I’ll give them that, but it falls flat in a lot of key areas – It does have a decent amount of weapons, but unless you can soldier through the first hour or so with a crappy wooden sword you will never see any of them. You do have more of a chance if you manage to spawn with the crossbow, being a ranged weapon it means you can keep your distance and limit your damage, thus ensuring a higher chance of success. Also you do have a levelling system, but even just to hit level 1 takes a stupid long time.

Now, I know you said it before and I can hear you shouting “But Craig, you just need practise and to just Git Gud!”, and to that I say hush your mouths!! Haha! Now, I will give this game some credit – The level designs are great and sort of unique, even though originality does kinda drop off after a while, however the area that this game does shine is online co-op; it’s very functional, and I didn’t run in to any issues at all during my time of playing – You can mount other players for power boosts, which was rather neat, and it can be used to aid in your tactical advantage as it doubles the player on top’s damage, which really helps when attempting to kill everything in the room. The whole process is so much easier when using co-op and makes the game much more enjoyable.

Well….Here are my final thoughts on Looterkings. The game can be fun, but only in co-op with some mates; if you are looking for a single player experience, walk away very fast as you just won’t enjoy it – My suggestion would be to play games such as Dark Souls, or Necropolis, which also have co-op, but the single player campaign is highly enjoyable and has a really good, fair difficulty curve unlike Looterkings. I am still going to keep an eye on Looterkings to see how it will progress further as it is still in Early Access, and I do have to give these games the benefit of the doubt – It’s not easy developing games that you want the masses to enjoy, I get that, but maybe they need to listen to the people buying the games a little bit more.

I previously gave this game a 6/10 as I believed it had a lot of potential which I still believe…But it seems they are quite away from a fully enjoyable product – For now my score has changed to a 4/10. I am hoping Looterkings can bring this score back up as I would love this game to succeed.