Did ya’ miss me?! Of course you did! Craig here again with yet another Early Access review. Look – I love Early Access games; can you blame me?! I can already hear your groans, but to spare you the pain, I won’t go over my usual rant – So you may be asking me “Oi Craig, what Early Access game have you got for us today then?” I hear you shout in anticipation…Well, my little turtle doves, allow me to introduce you to a little number called Looterkings.

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Looterkings is a procedurally generated dungeon crawler, in which you must fight your way to the top of a sprawling labyrinth of caverns and ravines, until you reach the hallowed halls of the legendary Elven Queen. Simple, right? 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; it’s a shame I couldn’t use it as a weapon, although it’d probably only do 1 damage. This aspect of the game reminded me a lot of a little game back on the PS2 called Maximo, where when you lost health, your clothing was destroyed, reducing you to your little heart-patterned tighty-whiteys when you were one hit away from death. What a way to go right?!

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So, what can I actually tell you about my time with Looterkings? To be perfectly honest, not a huge amount due to my constant deaths…And I mean constant. You rock in to your first room and boom, a huge horde of skeleton dudes come at you with bloodlust in their eye sockets, and take you out in an instant if you’re caught off guard. Like most dungeon crawlers, when you die, you’re flung right back to the start again; at this point, I was getting very frustrated with the game, as it seems like you’re a bit screwed from the get-go, and the loot to purchase new items is incredibly sparse. I think this game is more geared towards co-op play, which I was excited to delve in to, but unfortunately, every time I tried, I could not join any other players – I believe I would of at least been able to get further in the game if I was able to buddy up with some friends or random strangers…

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Now don’t get me wrong, even with the issues I faced this game is still a very fun game to play – I enjoyed the whole concept of the game, and the goblins just look awesome and hilarious, but I just could not progress in the game to save my life due to the instant difficulty spike. Now I know some of you will say “Well you know Craig you just gotta git gud”, and to you good sirs and madams, I say “Shhhhh” – This game is hard. Ball-bustingly hard. Dark Souls hard. There is not standard rise in difficulty like in many other rougelikes and dungeon crawlers – It’s simply jump in, and bam you’re dead within 10 minutes if you’re unlucky.

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Overall, I believe this game will be great in the future once its fully released, and the once the difficulty is scaled alot more effectively than it currently is, but at the moment I can only say that Looterkings is a good game, but is at the moment solely geared towards those who love challenge – In the end of the day, though, that is why it is in Early Access; I can see Looterking’s potential, and I will recommend people buy this game due to the fact that it’ll get better with time, and with the added benefit of the devs being extremely active in the community; however, at the moment I would not recommend this to anyone who is new to the dungeon crawler genre, or those who don’t like being forced into a challenge. You WILL break your Keyboard over this game.

I’m going to give Looterkings a 6/10 in it’s current state – Looterkings has a lot of potential, but it’s just not quite there yet – I will be revisiting Looterkings over its Early Access life to keep you guys update on its progress.

Check out the Steam Page here >>>>> Looterkings Steam Page