A roguelike deckbuilder slot car racing game? Sign me up for this incredibly satisfying mashup of ideas! It took me a run or two to really understand how the game worked, but from there on in, I was loopy for The Loopler. [I hate myself for that pun.]
The Loopler asks you to score a certain amount of points to clear a round. You don’t control your slot car directly, but instead you control the track, the car parts, some cards, and some charms that directly influence how your slot car runs on the track. Your car runs out of fuel quickly, and its fuel efficiency for refuelling gets worse over time. If you conk out, your car loses health, and the game is over when the car’s reliability reaches 0%. Your job is to either make it to round 12 and beat the boss, or tackle infinity mode, which explodes the game out to a mammoth 100-ish levels to clear so that your car can never slow down and drives infinitely.
Each track has a unique layout made of straights and corners, and selecting the right track and car combo will help you reach your goal. Some cars do better at keeping speed while drifting through corners. Others, like the rocket, are all about top speed or boosting. Cars come with five parts that can be swapped out and upgraded with gold to boost various stats, and the number of stats each part can play increases through the rewards unlock tree. It’s one of the few meta progressions that can help you tackle infinity mode and battle online leaderboard scores for each track or challenge.
The track itself will have empty spaces for gates to be purchased and placed. There are lots of gate types. Some give score boosts, whilst others boost the car’s top speed. Ghost Gates unleash a ghost car to follow you for a few seconds, giving a score bonus, and Freeze Gates freeze your fuel for a few seconds, giving you more time. There are also meta gates like Score Multiplier Lucky Gates that generate more points over time. The order of gate placement is key to their success. Gates can also be upgraded with repeats, encouraging players to have a variety of different arrangements to boost their car and score. Gates inject strategy into The Loopler and work very well.
Cards are more deckbuilder-like, unsurprisingly. Players draw one from a pack of two or three, and each card has a type (for example, score, boost, fuel, luck). They’ll also have a use case for triggering them. As you have limited card slots, choosing a refuelling card that triggers on each lap or per 8 drifts might be more useful on the short donut track than having a refuelling card that triggers when a certain amount of boost and top speed have been reached. Cards can be upgraded with multiples, and these can get big boosts in Infinity mode, where cards can jump straight to level 5, making them potent immediately.
Lastly, The Loopler has charms. These can be earned as rewards per run or bought in the shop like everything else. They’ll reduce shop costs, increase luck, reduce score goal multipliers, allow gates to trigger twice… all kinds of things. Mixing and matching charms to suit your build is critical to some cars, but for others, it’s worth investing your gold in upgrading gates and car parts more. I found charms more useful when attempting an Infinity run.
Whilst the game is hands-off from a driving perspective, setting everything up and watching the slot car go (at 3x speed) gives the same dopamine rush as an incremental does. The numbers go up, but it’s all based on my strategy and RNG luck with the shop and rewards to make the best of what I have. Each track has six difficulties, and then there are bespoke challenges to tackle. A run to round 12 will take around 15-20 minutes, whilst infinity will take a few hours as the rounds get longer over time. Whilst that might force a few people to tap out and let the game run for a minute or two on its own, all your time is rewarded with a long unlock tree that adds more gates, cards, charms, and vehicle parts into the mix for future runs.
I didn’t think I’d enjoy The Loopler quite as much as I did. It’s a satisfying time sink that rewards careful planning and synergy thinking. Just one more run? Ha… I’ll see you in an hour!
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