There’s an indie game called Achievement Unlocked that Lootbox Lyfe+ reminded us a lot of. In that game, everything you did got you an achievement. You moved, have an achievement. You jumped, have an achievement. You died, have an achievement. The fun was in working out what would get you another one, and that became the motivator – more so than things like levels and leveling up. It’s still around, we think. It’s well worth a play.
Lootbox Lyfe+ has that same cheeky, fourth-wall breaking approach. But instead of showering you with achievements (we have Aabs Animals for that), it plays around with lootboxes. Because, at the start of Lootbox Lyfe+, you can barely do anything. The little ball you control can’t jump, move left or right, or perform anything like an attack. That’s because all of those are unlocked from lootboxes, and those lootboxes can be found in the environment.
Lootbox Lyfe+ is, if we’re being honest, more Treasure Chest Lyfe+. There’s very little that makes them lootboxes. But the point is still there; in the first chest, you gain the ability to move left and right. Now you can reach the chest that lets you jump. And then the next which lets you view a map. Slowly but surely, your little blob develops the basic moves of a platforming protagonist.
It’s a fantastic start to a game, something that deserves a Let’s Play video to really capture your reactions. If we’re being honest, Lootbox Lyfe+ can’t quite keep this tempo up for the rest of the game, but the process is still there – just stretched thinner. You move through a level, find more chests, and open them to apply fantastic new moves to your little blob of plasticine.
Outside of the central, rather brilliant joke of unlocking lootboxes to get the basic stuff you might need to play a game (there’s commentary here: live service games make you pay for things that should be baked into the game), this is more of a conventional Metroidvania. Lootbox Lyfe+’s world is a sprawling map of eleven different biomes, and you won’t be able to get to them all at the start. You need double jumps, wall climbs, pickaxes and more, and you will get them from – you guessed it – lootboxes.
The basic movement around this world is on the awkward side. Being a ball, you’re subject to certain laws of physics. You tend to roll as you land. If you miss a platform by millimetres, you can kind of roll yourself back onto the platform. But this leads to another issue, where you tend to build momentum and overshoot areas that you’d prefer to stay still on.
Ultimately, being a ball is a ballache in Lootbox Lyfe+. For a game that’s a precision platformer, we got fed up with using a jump that is light in the rise but heavy in the drop, and trying to anticipate those weird physics. Constantly trying to stay on platforms, even though we’d made the jump, was another one. It’s just an ungainly main character, and we often felt like we were hauling it to checkpoints, rather than being truly in control of it. But it’s unique, and some difficulty-fiends will relish the opportunity to try to master it.
The map, too, is perhaps a little too large for its own good. There are no real objective markers, so you’re given the freedom to find chests where you can. Which is great for a sense of exploration and the resulting accomplishment when you stumble over another chest. But it’s absolutely pants when you find yourself pushing in a direction, only to be belatedly told that, nah, you went this way too early. We got lost more than once, and struggled to know where Lootbox Lyfe+ wanted us to be.
But ride these waves and Lootbox Lyfe+ can be a rather spiffing little platformer. Stacking on ability after ability, at roughly three times the pace that Samus might, for example, is a bit of a lark. It’s at its best in the opening moments, when that cadence is something of a punchline, but it’s still good in the latter game, too. You are within your rights to forget what abilities you’ve unlocked over the course of the game: you will be that big and wobbly with them.
And the levels are well constructed, too. There’s nothing too spectacular or original – Lootbox Lyfe+, like most platformers, loves rope and spikes – but the sheer labyrinth-like construction of its world is quite impressive to behold. When things click into place and you head in the right direction, and unlock checkpoint after checkpoint on the way to a game-changing ability, well, it feels gratifying. Lootbox Lyfe+ definitely has that in its locker.Â
So there’s a trade to be had, which is appropriate for something as transactional as lootboxes. If you are happy giving up precision in the ball’s controls, and you are willing to get lost on occasion, then what you get in return is an incredibly fast-paced system of unlocks – possibly the fastest you will find in a Metroidvania. The good stuff in Lootbox Lyfe+ comes at a price.
You can buy Lootbox Lyfe+ from the Xbox Store
