"Loop Hero" won PC Gamer's "Best Design" award in 2021 because the game is small but perfectly formed; PCG editor-in-chief Evan Lahti said, "If 'Diablo' is a pleasant ARPG liquid in a 10-gallon tank, then 'Diablo. Loop Hero' is a thimble of super-concentrated essence. Loop: Level up. Fight enemies (automatically). Equip loot. Repeat. How can combat be so engaging when it's basically zero control?"

I too was sucked into Loop Hero's endless cycle at the time, and this morning I fired it up to refresh my memory, looked at a few screens, and fell in love all over again for longer than necessary. The game is deceptively simple at first, until you start to realize how it scales and what kind of long-term planning is required to get everything completely out of a given layout.

To summarize: Loop Hero is a really good game, well worth the $15/£12.50, but you don't have to think about that now; Bloons 6 TD is also available for the same low price, and it's a great game that's a lot more fun than the other games on this list. This is a cute tower defense game featuring monkeys. [If Loop Hero does anything, it's that it inverts the classic tower defense style, and in doing so almost creates its own genre. It sets up lines of defense to destroy and resources to exploit, and tries to determine the damage output of the loop in detail.

The Loop Hero Dream' To achieve this madness, Christmas comes with 13,283 loop levels. This is one of the most complex and satisfying games in years, with brilliant art and a surprisingly vast meta-structure outside of the core loop de loop. If it's free, you can't go wrong, and if you're starting fresh, here are some tips to get you started. The second is life advice: "Know when to GTFO.