Loop8: Summer of Gods

An Exercise in apathy, neither solid nor liquid. Not exactly bad, but not very good either. Just a bit 'meh,' really.

A good time loop mechanic is supposed to give you enough variety so that repetition doesn't set in. Unfortunately, this is where Loop8 falls flat. You’ll be going over the same conversations and they’re just not interesting enough to make it worthwhile. It also doesn’t help that there’s only a small variety of enemies, and that the underworld is mostly just the town with a different colour palette. It's hard not to get annoyed when you realise that you’re still not strong enough to take out the next boss, and have no choice but to repeat the last few weeks.

While Loop8's story has the potential to be incredibly interesting, it never really lands and fails to leave an emotional impact towards the end. It's all presented beautifully and has a unique mix of gameplay styles and ideas, but their repetitive and frustrating nature makes the whole experience a chore. It's like toiling away at your summer job and going through the motions until it's time to leave.

Loop8 is a game full of great ideas that never comes together.

A social sim without convincing relationship building, an adventure game with messy and disjointed storytelling, and an RPG with boring combat and repetitious stat grinding all rolled into one.

The very worst offense of it all is that normally, when a game is bad, I would have to suffer through it once and get to move on. In the case of Loop8, it forced me to experience the same exact terrible content over and over again by its very design, breeding a sense of resentment towards a game I haven’t felt in a very long time.

Loop8: Summer of Gods aspires to capture the human experience through a multitude of ambitious subsystems. Unfortunately, virtually none of these ideas make a meaningful impact on the game. The end result is a shallow, disjointed, and undeveloped experience. Rather than reflecting the nuances of our everyday lives, Loop8 most closely resembles the lives of aquarium fish.

Loop8 is an interesting premise, tied together by a string of ideas with an implementation that ends up destroying any enjoyment the player could have with the title.

There is a lot to like about Loop8, and there’s the sense that the creative team put a lot of work into the symbolism and theming of it. They shot for the stars. Unfortunately, it fell slightly short, and while it’s interesting and different, it never lives up to the clear potential it had. But that’s also okay. At least they tried something different. Gaming wouldn’t be worth it if people didn’t take a creative risk every once in a while.

Loop8: Summer of Gods has some good ideas going for it but needed a bit more work in some areas for me to be able to fully recommend it. I enjoyed the story but it takes time to get good and I had to endure a lot of repeated parts to get to it. On top of that the combat can be a bit confusing and doesn’t offer enough control over your team. There’s some good things here but just know you’ll have to deal with quite a few annoyances along the way if you decide to jump into this one.