"LORT" is a Delightfully Unserious Co-Op Roguelite Experience in the Making! (Preview)

Sometimes I love a game on the sillier side. While many newer games coming out are nearly lifelike, there are moments where I yearn for an experience that is unapologetically itself. In comes LORT, a co-op roguelite in a fantasy land where you run around and build yourself up to become powerful enough to conquer anyone in your way—or die trying. I jumped into this game with a friend, and was greeted with hours worth of medieval mayhem and dying...a lot. While this game is still in early access, there is still enough content to keep you going on countless runs and blasting around on an adventure of explosive proportions! When you also add up to 7 of your friends into one game... yeah, it's gonna get wild real quick.

In LORT, you start with a swordsman build to get a handle on the game's core loop. While there are only 5 characters you can unlock in the current build, more are on the way with the developer having just revealed a new character on June 23 and set to debut in the v0.8 update. Each character comes with a couple abilities and a passive. The stats are fairly simple, with players being able to upgrade either Strength, Agility, and Intelligence. Strength is pretty straightforward, but Agility is more focused on attack speed while Intelligence reduces the cooldown on your skills. Depending on the characters you play, focusing on one over the other will help you go far in your runs.

The levels in LORT have enemies spread out all over the map to the point where you can pick a direction to go in and come across dozens of enemy camps to storm with your weapons and skills. During your destructive rampage, you'll also amass gold from enemies and barrels which can be spent on chests spawned all over the map which give new weapons and buffs to further power yourself up for the battles ahead. The weapon variety ranges from swords and magical staves to guns, adding to the insanity of the game. Depending on your character, you can go from casting fireballs to emptying a magazine on a boss, and I think that juxtaposition between "traditional" and "unconventional" weapon choices makes this game shine in the silliness department.

The items you can get from chests also shake things up significantly, with bonuses able to be stacked on each other to help you overpower yourself and steamroll everything around you. There are items that boost critical chance, as well as items that make attacks land multiple times; and that's just scratching the surface of what goodies you can find. By the end of one of my runs, a significant part of my screen was already covered with the sheer amount of items I had picked up!

Currently, the game has players go through five levels until they land on the final boss. In each level, players have 3 in-game days to power themselves up and defeat the area's boss. It's about as chaotic as you would expect, as the time might pass you by before you know it, so it's important to balance side missions and the main objective. That said, the developers have mentioned that an Endless mode will come to the game in their early access roadmap!

As fun as it was to run around and tear down every goblin in my way, I did feel like the world was a little empty at times. Sure, there are plenty of enemy camps and towers to invade, but between those points of interest were just long stretches of land with some chests and the occasional healing shrine. There was also some difficulty I had with general traversal in the Trollhole Summit area where I couldn't scale some of the mountains in the area due to my lack of jump height, so exploration wasn't really easy there. It wasn't enough to disengage me from the whole experience, but was enough of a hiccup in my playthrough that I felt it was worth bringing up.

Overall, LORT has a promising foundation for an entertaining co-op roguelite experience. The worlds feel a bit sparse at times outside of the enemy encampments, but there is still plenty of fun to be had in the campaign's few levels so far. Since it's still in early access, there is plenty of room for LORT to grow and add more content, which the developers are absolutely planning to do given their recent updates. I can't wait to see this game expand in Q3 2026 and beyond! If you're looking for an entertaining co-op roguelite experience similar to Risk of Rain 2 or just love destructive combat like in Dungeon Rampage, then I would recommend staying plugged in to this one!