Dragon Loop - Switch Review
"I feel sad and a bit disappointed"
Dragon Loop is a metroidvania that was originally released on Steam almost exactly a year ago and now finds its way onto consoles. I like to do some research on the devs of any game I review because I like to champion them where appropriate; however, my research into the developers of Dragon Loop hit a bit of a dead end! I think there are a couple of Chinese developers whose names I’m unable to find out/translate, but when a small team puts together a mostly hand-drawn indie game, that’s always super impressive. So whoever they are, let's see what they’ve put together!
The Good
In Dragon Loop you play as Xi, a young girl who has lost her memories and is trying to find out why. She is aided and abetted by Ouro, a small Navi-like spirit who is key to how Xi approaches combat and traversal. Things play out in fairly typical metroidvania fashion as Xi finds new upgrades to how she can use Ouro, which allows her to access previously inaccessible areas. Boss fights take the form of various creatures that she encounters and once defeated, Xi can collect them as spirits which she can use in combat situations. I really enjoyed the steady progression element of Dragon Loop, and it felt well balanced; at no point did I feel like giving up but also it never felt easy. That balance is often really hard to strike in these kinds of games.
Let's talk about Dragon Loop’s biggest gameplay hook: the time loop system. In a crowded genre you need to do what’s needed to stand out and be original, and the developers have certainly done that here. There is a five-day time loop system, which took me a little while to get my head around, but I’ll attempt to explain it. There are some time gates spread around fixed positions in the map; when you get to a time gate, you MUST advance things forward by a day to proceed past the gate. You start on Day 1, and each time you pass through a gate, it goes up by one day to a maximum of Day 5, after which the loop resets back to Day 1. What this means is that an area might look a certain way when you pass through it on Day 2, for example, but in order to pass through that same area on a different day, you need to review the map and work out how to do that, i.e., you will want to find ways to bypass time gates and/or pass through more of them so that the time has advanced to a different day in the loop compared to when you last passed through that same area. Capiche? Yeah, it’s a little hard to understand but when you do, it makes everything feel strategic in a way I haven’t really experienced in a game of this ilk before.
As a result of the time loop and the expanse of the map, Dragon Loop offers up a lot of content and will keep you entertained for hours. Once you work out its structure, the exploration becomes addictive, and there are plenty of minigames to entertain Xi and Ouro as well; Dragon Loop is great value for money.
TL;DR
- Well-balanced progression
- Time loop mechanic is original and addictive
- Plenty of content on offer here
The Bad
We really have to address the elephant in the room with Dragon Loop, and its something which has changed the scoring from a potential 8 or 9 to something much lower (I can’t remember one particular element contributing to such a big scoring swing in all of my reviews), and that is the general sound and music. For starters, there just seems to be something really quite wrong with how the music has been set up. In some areas it is barely audible, and in others it sounds like it is being fast-forwarded in parts, almost like when you fast-forward a CD or a tape. The selection of music itself is also questionable; you begin in a cave-like area but rather than having music befitting of that space, there is some cheery music you would expect to hear in the main menu of a Mario game. The SFX as well… They just sound so tinny, cartoony and amateurish.
In a similar vein I found the combat hard to get used to in Dragon Loop because there was hardly any feedback when striking enemies, but after a while I then realised it was also linked to the poor SFX. I would often attack an enemy up close with a melee attack and it was unclear how many successful hits I had landed, which led to a hit-and-hope scenario. If one element of the game is neglected (in this case SFX), it does lead to a number of edge cases that affect immersion, sadly.
TL;DR
- Woeful music and SFX
- Combat feedback is affected as a result
Final Score: 6/10
I feel sad and a bit disappointed; Dragon Loop had the potential to be a great metroidvania (and still does, if things are fixed) because of its main gameplay hook; the time loop mechanic is refreshing in a world of standard metroidvania fare.
However, the music and SFX being so ‘off’ completely undermines the experience. Doing some googling, it seems this has been an issue since the Steam release last year, so you would have thought that there would have been some efforts to fix it for the console release. I even waited a couple of days after release to see if a day-one patch may have fixed some of the issues, but alas, no. Dragon Loop is great if you play it on mute, but then you may as well not be playing it at all.
Thank you for checking out our Dragon Loop Switch review, thank you to Happy Player for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
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