Looterkings

My first session with Looterkings was two minutes of circle-strafing a shielded enemy in the opening room while my goblin slowly ran out of stamina. That told me everything I needed to know about the combat ceiling here. This is a four-player online co-op dungeon crawler built around procedurally generated floors, room-by-room enemy clearing, and a goblin merchant between levels where you spend gold to gear up - swords, crossbows, armor, helmets, and around forty weapons total according to the dev material. The hook is the stacking mechanic: any goblin can mount a teammate's shoulders, combining both players' god-powers for a short window. When it clicks with a full squad it produces genuinely chaotic, funny moments. When you're solo, it just makes you feel like a naked goblin wandering a corridor alone, which is also literally what is happening on screen. The combat is where this game loses me fastest. There's no dodge roll, no block, and no aiming reticle on ranged weapons - you estimate shot arcs manually, which the devs apparently intended as a skill curve but which mostly reads as an oversight. Melee is functionally unplayable past early floors because enemies hit hard enough that you need range, and range without a crosshair is a patience tax. Enemy health does not scale with player count, so a two-player run through a room balanced for four is a slow war of attrition. The god-power system has a brutal downside: if any teammate goes down, the entire squad loses their special ability, which kicks in hardest on early floors when those powers are your only real damage multiplier. The loop of "die, restart from floor one, repeat" is meant to feel rogue-like but lands closer to punishing because the shop fills up based on your cumulative XP level, and gold earned during a failed run does not carry over. You spend several runs with full pockets and nothing to spend them on. The public lobby situation is the real dealbreaker in 2025. Peak concurrent player counts have been sitting at or near one for years. If you don't have three friends ready to queue at the same time, you are effectively buying a solo experience in a game that was not designed for solo play. The Twitch integration mode - where viewers can trigger buffs or debuffs on a streamer's run - was an interesting idea for 2017 but is irrelevant context now. The audioscape is thin: one music track on menus, near-silence in dungeons, and sound effects that feel under-normalised. Procedural level layouts do vary the rooms and enemy placements each run, which is the one mechanical pillar that holds up, but variety in room geometry does not fix the underlying combat feel. Steam's aggregate review score sits in the "Mostly Positive" range on a small sample, and that number makes sense when you understand who is leaving those reviews - people who played it at launch with a full four-player group and had a genuinely funny few hours. The goblin aesthetics are deliberately low-brow and the tone is self-aware enough to be charming in small doses. If you have a stable Discord group that plays everything together and you are looking for a cheap, weird, low-stakes session game, there is a floor of enjoyment here. Anyone else should walk past.

Fred · Scout Team

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