If you absolutely love action-heavy dungeon crawlers like The Binding of Isaac, and the chaos from Vampire Survivors you're going to need to take a look at Heroes Of Loot: Gauntlet Of Power from Orangepixel.
There's a very familiar feeling with Gauntlet Of Power, giving you a randomly generated dungeon to run through a room at a time with your little character and take down all the enemies in each room. If you've ever played a real-time dungeon crawler (especially Isaac), you'll be instantly familiar with one major difference and it's thoroughly unique which is — the Gauntlet.
Your Gauntlet is your weapon. Well, actually, it's many different weapons in one. It has eight slots, one for each direction you can fire in. When you pick your starting character, you get an initial weapon on one direction slot. As you take down enemies and level up, you get to pick a new weapon to stick into one of the directional slots to then fire that weapon automatically in that direction. You can also pick the same weapon, to place onto an existing one in a slot to power it up a level too.
That alone would be pretty darn interesting and it's a really fun spin on the genre, giving you an endless amount of replay value, allowing you to make some really interesting characters during your run. There's more to it though. Plenty more.
Not only do you pick a random weapon to add in a direction of your choosing, there's also various special weapon combinations to discover in the Gauntlet slots. Two weapons together might create a union with a new weapon. There's also a whole bunch of items to find, to further boost and change your character during your run.
On top of that there's boss battles, a shop to spend your coins in, new characters to unlock and more.
There's definitely some Vampire Survivor style chaos going on as you're running around in here. At times, it can be a little difficult to tell what's going on, as you're firing off eight different weapons with pixel-art enemies running around at the same time, some coming straight for you and some keeping distance firing at you. It definitely could do with highlighting enemy projectiles better but that's about my only issue with it.
Check out the trailer:
Direct Link
Features:
- Randomly generated dungeons, items enemies and bosses, you never play the same game twice.
- 5 base weapons and 9 special combo's and union weapons - all upgradable in strength.
- Unique items that enhance your powers against the horde of enemies.
- Over 14 end bosses.
- 6 dungeons covering 16 levels and a final boss-of-all-bosses battle.
- 2 playable and 2 unlockable classes.
- Unlockable Rune-power options to support you in completing the game.
- Perma unlockable Forged cards.
- Secret rooms, Quests, Treasure rooms, and Shops.
Works great on desktop Linux (Kubuntu 24.04) and perfect on Steam Deck too. Might actually be my favourite game so far from Orangepixel.
Heroes Of Loot: Gauntlet Of Power is available with Native Linux support on Steam.
Should be relatively short game, though I doubt I manage to finish it in one hour. Six hours could be more likely.
If you're unsure, try the demo.
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