Review: Loot Master

Overview If you’re hungry for an exciting, RPG-style gaming experience, Loot Master is not the solution. It's way too basic and limiting to be worth $5.99 and should be free or 99 cents, at most (Vay is a good option for RPG fans).

Gameplay While Loot Master is basically an endless face off with wave upon wave of enemies, your character is never visible on the screen and there isn’t much action involved with attacks. There is no storyline and basically as soon as the app is launched, the onslaught begins.

But let’s not be misleading about the activity involved in this “onslaught”. The enemies only inflict damage once they’ve crossed over from one side of the screen to the other (meaning that they’ve reached you) which is rather uneventful, and so a flurry of taps is necessary in order to kill as many devilish creatures as possible before they can reach your side of the screen. Tapping an enemy will damage it, eventually killing it, and often will result in an item being left behind on the screen. This is where the looting comes in. Unattended swords, shields, potions, spells and accessories can be picked up and dropped into an open item slot on the screen. Once equipped, an item may increase a variety of strength, health or magic factors to help move users through more enemies with improved skill. The main goal: score as many points as possible.

Lastly, there is no option to save progress and upon exiting and reentering the app, a new campaign must be started. Review This game is not worth $5.99. Not even close. In fact, as an app that sells at that price, it’s garbage. Games sold at this price really need to take advantage of the iPhone’s abilities, and that doesn’t mean a simple usage of the shake feature to clear items off the screen; it means taking advantage of the device’s graphical and processing strengths. Too many similarly priced games look like they belong on a Playstation Portable. This one looks like it belongs on a Gameboy, and doesn’t make up for it with depth either. Besides the fact that there is no storyline, no game depth, no on-screen protagonist and sparing visual activity involved in gameplay, the app has no save feature. This means that all progress must be made in one very rapid and unrewarding sitting. Imagine my confusion then (after having established that this is possibly the biggest rip-off in the App Store) upon seeing the high customer rating for this game. Let’s get to the bottom of this. It’s understandable that RPG fans are hungry for something—anything—that can qualify as a functioning time-killer for their iPhones, but that does not mean that every attempt at an RPG-style game is good. And this isn’t even a real RPG! It’s important to demand quality out of games at this price: a save feature, some scenery changes and graphical diversity, a story line, a character. All of those things are basic RPG-style necessities that should not be overlooked. If your gaming experience is limited to watching and tapping on creatures that continuously float across the screen, something is wrong. As a free app, Loot Master would deserve some praise, but it takes only a quick look at the other paid apps, specifically the $2.99 Vay RPG, which is a much more functional and complete game, to know that this game should be avoided, at best (it really deserves criticism and a price reduction). Summary Prank your friends by telling them this is a valuable and well-made RPG. It’s the complete opposite, so they should be irritated.

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