From The Elder Scrolls Skyrim to Diablo 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3, inventory management is typically one of the most time consuming and frustrating parts of many games. While the likes of Resident Evil 4 and its briefcase Tetris have found innovative ways to toy with the system, the next evolution looks to be coming up with smart ways to make sorting your loot both essential and enjoyable. Following the breakout success of Steam multiplayer game Backpack Battles comes Megaloot, a new roguelike game where meticulous loot management is very much the key to success.
In Megaloot, you’ll fight through battle after battle against numerous foes, gathering an absolute mountain of gear and items as you progress. As you might expect, your bustling inventory is key to the strategy of this roguelike game. Loot can be equipped to your character to boost your stats in traditional fashion, but it can also be combined with other items in your inventory or converted into raw stats to help you through a tough encounter.
The simplest example of this: if you have two matching weapons of the same rarity, you can combine the pair to upgrade its tier and its stats in kind. Gather together multiple tiers of an item and you can quickly zoom through upgrade levels in a chain reaction to reach all-new heights. With more than 100 unique loot items providing boosts across 24 different character stats, there’s a lot of build potential as you fight through Megaloot’s mysterious, seemingly endless tower of treasure.
Encounter something that feels beyond your capabilities, however, and you have another option at your disposal – quite literally. You can destroy unwanted items (or, in moments of true desperation, even ones you’d rather have kept) to convert them into a temporary burst of raw stats allowing you to overcome a challenge that might have put a stop to your run otherwise.
As you progress deeper into the tower, you’ll unlock a deck of cards used to define your initial loadout. Each time you start out, you select a starting character to play as, but you can also toggle on additional buffs and debuffs that come with their own set of costs or benefits, allowing you to tweak your strengths and weaknesses as you please.
If that all sounds up your alley, the good news is that there’s an imminent opportunity to get hands on with the game yourself. A new closed playtest for Megaloot is about to start, and solo developer Axilirate and publisher Ravenage Games encourage anyone who’s interested to apply to join the test. “Players’ feedback is invaluable to us, and we welcome any suggestions on how to improve and enhance the Megaloot experience.”
The Megaloot playtest begins Thursday April 18. If you want to take part, you can sign up right now by heading to the game’s Steam store page and clicking ‘request access.’ In the meantime, there’s also a free Steam demo giving an early look at some of the item combination and evolution mechanics that you can try right now. The full game is set to arrive some time in 2024, and you can wishlist it if you want to be kept up to date with notifications when it becomes available.
If you just can’t get enough of racking up gear and stats, then you’ll feel right at home among many of the best RPG games on PC. We’ve also rounded up the best indie games in 2024 for plenty of great experiences from smaller teams.
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