Heroes of Loot 2

The original Heroes of Loot put you in control of a Warrior, Valkyrie, Wizard or Elf who wanted nothing more than to stripmine their local dungeon of anything shiny and valuable that the owners had failed to nail down. The sequel, a fast-paced, fun take on the dungeon crawler that jettisons any semblance of planning and strategy in favour of frantic monster slaughter, is more of the same.

Instead, you choose two heroes from the aforementioned quartet and swap between them as you traverse the dungeons. You need a melee specialist – Warrior or Valkyrie – and a ranged attack expert – the fireball-chucking Wizard or the Elven bowman, and each has unique skills that you can take advantage of. The wizardly fireballs do a lot of damage, for example, but he is relatively weak and the Elf can shoot and run a lot faster.

Once you've picked your team, it's off to the dungeon to start slaughtering your way to a better bank balance. Level layouts are randomly generated, but you'll be guaranteed a mix of traps, locked doors and spawning monsters, as well as treasure chests to smash open and the odd non-player character to offer you hints or sell you some goodies.

You can swap between your two characters by tapping an onscreen button, switching you from ranged to close-combat attacks. If you should happen upon a useful item like a key or a bomb then you need to remember which character is actually carrying it so you can swap back when you need to use it. As some monsters are more vulnerable to ranged or close attacks and you're sometimes unable to fight while carrying an item, this can turn out to be an important decision.

The game throws ‘quests’ at you in the form of (usually) simple tasks to complete, such as finding a hidden key or destroying part of the dungeon with a bomb. These add a bit of spice, but the game is so fast-moving and the graphics so tiny (more on this shortly) that you may find yourself both receiving and completing quests without realising.

As you progress through each ‘run’ – i.e. each play through before one of the characters is killed and the game ends – you can gain experience levels to unlock new abilities and better stats, as well as find magic items or weapons to boost your characters. Some of your finds will continue being useful on later runs, while others are strictly for that character’s lifespan.

Orange Pixel have a definite house style, typified by small animated characters and retro-looking pixel art backgrounds, some of which wouldn’t look out of place on an early Game Boy title. It’s cute as far as it goes, but the animated sprites and background objects in HoL2 might mark the point where the developers have overreached themselves, at least on mobile. On a phone screen (we tested it with a 5-inch Android phone to test the game) it can be tricky to see what everything actually is.

You always know which minuscule blob of pixels is you and which is an enemy, but identifying exactly what that red blob is or what exactly those Pac-Man-shaped monsters are is difficult to impossible. The screen can quickly fill up with bad guys and missiles just a few pixels wide, and while the game is fun to play, it all feels a bit abstract.

Heroes of Loot 2 manages to ratchet up its challenge quite effectively. It won’t keep you playing for long, but in short bursts it can be a blast.

• Heroes of Loot 2 is out now on PC, Android and iOS, published by Orange Pixel
• Read other gaming reviews on theartsdesk
• The best games of 2016

@stuarthoughton