Luck & Loot Review
Slay monsters in creepy pixelated dungeons with your customized dice.
Luck & Loot. SMARTcreative / GrabTheGames
Luck & Loot is a dice-building roguelite from developer SMARTcreative and publisher GrabTheGames. In the game, you explore a series of dungeons where you’ll use your dice to combat creatures in turn-based battles.
The first available hero is the warrior; two more heroes with their own unique sets of dice faces will unlock later. Each of the dungeons has a route with battles, shops, random events, and ultimately a boss. The route is linear, but the path will sometimes branch, allowing you to pick between multiple options before the roads converge once more.
Luck & Loot. SMARTcreative / GrabTheGames
You have four customizable dice at your disposal that you will roll up to three times in battle, strategically locking the dice you wish to keep. The eighty-plus faces you can upgrade and equip to the dice can do damage, inflict status effects, heal, and/or boost defense. You can edit your dice any time outside of battle, swapping faces to create a build and sacrificing unused faces to boost dice skill points and abilities. On the journey, you won’t just be finding new dice faces—dozens of unique relics are waiting to be discovered that give global boosts.
Earning enough experience during a run grants new unlocks before you start over, adding to the pool of available dice faces and more. In addition, difficulty modifiers will open up that you can use to make your life more difficult.
Luck & Loot features chunky pixel graphics, with mostly monochromatic sprites animated with simple, two-frame cycles. The background and foreground of the dungeon scene are also monochromatic. The action only takes up a fraction of the screen, but even in that tiny window, the game brims with a wonderful dark fantasy personality. The rest of the screen is devoted to stats and the dice-rolling UI. It’s simple, but it’s tastefully designed and easy to understand. Other UIs, such as the dice customization screen, are also refreshing in their simplicity. The game does a great job of communicating everything it needs to in its limited resolution. It all looks even better with the scanline filters turned on.
Luck & Loot. SMARTcreative / GrabTheGames
Luck & Loot is a great bite-sized, turn-based, dungeon-crawling experience. Tinkering with the dice builds is fun; there’s complexity here, but not enough to induce analysis paralysis. Individual sessions are short, so this was a perfect game to play when taking a break.
Luck & Loot is available now on Steam.
Overall Score: 7/10
Played on: Steam Deck
