Dragon Loop review

written 2026-07-22

Dragon Loop is a metroidvania I played in 2026-07 because Steam recommended it - the first game I've ever played because a platform recommended. It took about 20 hours to finish almost everything.

Dragon Loop is a weird case. It looked like a crappy knockoff metroidvania that I only even tried because I was desperate for one. And the first couple hours reinforced this view, with mediocre writing, ugly art that looks like placeholders, bad translation, cut off text, audio bugs, map bugs, and settings bugs. Every aspect of this game is the most unpolished I've ever seen.

And yet, I fucking love this game. It's one of the best metroidvanias I've ever played.

It just takes a couple hours before you start seeing what's amazing about it. There are two such things, related: its ability design and its nonlinear progression.

Ability design

It has more abilities than most metroidvanias. It has the standard set: dash, wall jump, and double jump, but also a grapple that can go through walls, a block you can place, a boomerang that refreshes your double jump when you catch it, a hoverboard, a thing you can place and then teleport to later, and many more! All of these have multiple uses, including advanced ones that lead to sequence breaks, they combine with each other in interesting ways, and every platforming challenge has multiple solutions. No other metroidvania has such a deep take on platforming and progression. And that's not even to mention their combat use! *All* of these abilities are also interesting in combat, since they can simultaneously deal damage, avoid damage, and reposition you for future attacks.

If there's a flaw, it's that they overlap much in purpose, and there aren't enough hard challenges in either platforming or combat to let you deeply explore the nuances. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Combat

It's a positional game where you mostly have to move out of the way of attacks rather than timing invulnerability, and you don't hitstun enemies. You have basic attacks that charge a meter called OP (Ouro points), and four powerful attacks that cost OP. You can use most of them without OP, but they aren't as good. Also most need some effort to get full value. Two deal lingering damage where they hit, so you want to place them where the enemy will stay for a second, and one of those can even be knocked around to keep it on the enemy! The boomerang can hit many times if you avoid catching it! Some Ouro attacks also make you briefly invulnerable, so you can use them like a parry if you save an OP.

Unlike many similar games, it doesn't have a pogo exactly, but at least three abilities can be used like one!

It has a flask healing system (you have a certain number of heals, refilled at save points, and using one makes you stand still for a second so you have to find a safe opportunity). It's shown as planting a flower that heals you when it blooms a few seconds later. Big missed opportunity to make placement matter - it'd be cool if you had to stay near it to heal or something - but it's still at least as interesting as other games' healing mechanics. And the delay between when you finish planting it and when it blooms is very long, which combined with how much it heals, creates a somewhat interesting decision: use it at high health, and risk waste, or use it at low health, and risk dying before it blooms. I don't really like this dynamic because I don't like abrupt losses, but it's serviceable.

Enemy design

Normal enemy design is pretty good: they don't do contact damage, most of them have projectile attacks. The problem is just that they're too weak. Too little health, often you can kill them before they even attack, and when they do attack they're too easy to dodge and do too little damage for your massive health pool.

There are some challenges with waves of normal enemies that mix in dynamic platforming elements and hazards in really cool ways. Sadly, even those challenges are very easy.

Most bosses have only 2-4 moves, but they're often good moves, or they have background aspects that create dynamic positioning challenges, like a floating hazard chasing you while other things happen, or a floor made of tiles that turn hazardous a moment after you touch them. Many bosses are also way too easy, but at least some are challenging.

Spirits

There's another type of attack where you summon a spirit to attack for you, which costs its own resource called SP. These are also interesting in that you need to time/place them well to get full value, but sadly the game has a bloated and incoherent approach to these. There are dozens of different spirits you can summon, too many for you to try them all and see which you like, plus you permanently upgrade them which encourages using only a few.

Equipment

The equipment system is just okay. You can equip a certain number of bonuses at a time, and they're balanced, but it doesn't do enough to encourage you to use different ones for different situations. You can just equip whatever and forget. Also, though you find new equipment often, it's usually duplicates, which add no new options unless you want to equip several stacks of the same thing.

Platforming

There's very few mandatory platforming challenges. Most are trivial if you have the right ability, but solving them without is very fun. And the game also well uses standard platformer elements like timed platforms and hazards. There's even a cool unique type of platform that moves to the side every time you bounce on it, and you can manipulate it to skip stuff.

Minigames

Many NPCs offer minigames. Most of these are lame because they're just isolated games that have nothing to do with Dragon Loop and are worse than it. Few or none are mandatory, but they offer useful rewards.

There are a few good ones though, like one that challenges you to use the sideways-moving platforms very well.

Conclusion

There's a NPC who tells a story about a peanut who grows up in a field of ginseng, and is mocked because peanuts are considered less valuable than ginseng, but the peanut decides to be proud of its identity anyway. I like this story because it's a beautiful analogy for the game itself: Dragon Loop is an unpolished piece of crap, so people ignore it in favor of more polished games. But it's wonderful in ways that none of those are.