Review: Looking For Heals

Review: Looking For Heals

Ever wondered what it’s like to get into Indie games as an MMO freak? Or just flat-out want to feel like a total Korean with insane APM? Well, look no further. Blue Bomber Games just brought out a new early action game that will make you feel all of that, and much more. In this well-designed action game, you can click to your heart’s content by killing endless amounts of bosses and collecting all the loot you could ever hope for.

What do you do? Command your squad of warriors while keeping them from an early grave in the only rogue-lite where the healer calls the shots. Heal, shield, and resurrect your way through a world filled with tough choices, powerful items, and elaborate boss fights inspired by MMO dungeon raids.

  • Fun and smooth gameplay:  The gameplay is just impressive, as someone who never played any sort of similar games, I felt immerged, and happy, with intuitive and straight forward objectives to look for. You progress through maps, collect coins by sending over your squad to destroy objects, and just keep going. All while you get to know more about the guild you are leading. At certain moments during the game, and mostly during boss fights, you feel like an absolute madman so to speak. You are spam clicking those heals, shielding your squad, then recalling them to you to avoid damage, all while you hear complementing music. Which felt almost like an adrenalin rush.
  • Amazing graphics: I was skeptical when I got to review the title, since according to forums, most indie games work horribly with Ultrawide monitors, but was happily surprised on the first bootup screen: It asks what resolution you want to run on with native ultrawide support, big plus. That being said, the game looks darn great, better than expected. It’s not a full 2d, like the older games, because it adds 3d elements to the mix. This all while feeling simple to look at. The maps are well-drawn and make you feel at home in moody environments, while also giving that extra “bossy feeling” to the arenas.
  • Perfect music: The music is just great, although, I wish there was an option to turn it down in the control section of the game, because you almost instantly tab out of the game, to reach for the volume mixer to turn the volume down to 10%. But one jump scare later, man does this music make you feel like you are an adventurer. It ranges from nice and cozy to giving goosebumps. While also adding that bossy feeling to fights
  • Story: Since this is my first introduction with this genre of games, I felt pleasantly surprised to realize that throughout the whole game, there is this one red line that keeps you playing the game. You get to know more and more about certain champions and quest givers, which is a nice touch. It just feels great, and has some really great sound effects to it as well.
  • The content: First I was going to place this way higher up in the list, and give it a good score, but it just didn’t feel right. Don’t get me wrong, the game itself feels great, and amazing, and very well thought out. But the point is, it just feels unfinished. The main character can acquire 4 members for his guild, with who he can continue to go and defeat an endless stream of mobs and bosses, and go on and capture loot. But it leaves me with a sorrow taste. You can only heal your squad, shield them for damage, and revive. To then recall them back to you for big attacks. I hoped that you could do anything more than that, but no. After that, you get put into a whole set of maps, which are great, but it gets repetitive after a while, with no progression what so ever. And further down the line, the same maps repeat, making you feel like you sort of wasted your money.
  • Loot system: Straight up: I don’t like it. Why you might ask? Well, the player needs to direct their fighting champions to destroy a single object on the map, on itself not bad. But it just takes too much time. You have 4 fighters, and a to clear out 10 loot objects (just a bookshelf or something) it takes too much time. It would feel a lot better if you could apply some sort of AOE effect, or even have the healer (the main character you control) clear out some loot while you are fighting the boss. Spending an extra whole minute per room after a single fight, just to click some objects for a low amount of coins, leaves you to lack lustering for more.
  • Stability: This game is in early access, so we have to respect this, but I found myself really angered about the way this game is being handled on my computer. Multiple times I got stuck in a menu that I could just simply not get out of. The only solution? Alt + F4. Only to find out that the game doesn’t autosave at all… And then having to replay the level I was in. Also, the game managed to make my second monitor freak out in a way I never felt. If you alt-tab out of the game, the game still has full control over your keyboard, oddly enough of course, and just kept on crashing the further I got into the game. After a quick look on the forums, I found out that I was not the only one who had this issue. Having the game just spitting out “unexpected gameplay error” just doesn’t make you smile. 
  • Controls: I was surprised by the opening screen that allows you to select the resolution, graphics, and controls. But again, this is the ONLY place where you can select these controls. If you are in the middle of the game and press ESC, you get a menu where you can see the controls, but somehow you can not edit them. The same goes for volume of the music. Another remark here is that most games in the current time period have automated layout scaling, which implies that if a user is not using a standard QWERTY layout, it would “remap” the key bindings to their respected counterpart on a different layout. This was sadly not the case. I joined the game, thinking that my WASD would be remapped to ZQSD (azerty), which did not happen at all.

Score: 60%
Credit to those who deserve it. This game is amazing if you plan on passing a few hours on it, or even play 24hours, but you can’t really play further. After the first hour you just start to feel like there is no purpose (besides replaying the progress lost after a crash). But for the current price point of 12.49€ I expected more. The content you get at the time of writing this review would be worth a solid 6.99€, but not more. But if you have the money for it, or just really enjoy these types of games, then I would strongly recommend you to give this game a shot. But beware of the crashes.