Dialoop review: Kaleidoscopic combos

Dialoop -Roguelite Puzzle- is a colorful indie title from the team at Byking Inc, meshing mechanics from match-3 puzzles, party games, and roguelite puzzles. It’s available for up to 8 players, but can also be enjoyed solo.

While Dialoop has some unique concepts and charming elements, it wasn’t entirely smooth sailing for this genre-hopping roguelite. Here’s Kyusai’s full review of Dialoop, looking at the core gameplay, the art style, and the overall player experience. This review was completed on PC. 

Slide to the left

Dialoop -Roguelite Puzzle- is a vibrant roguelite puzzle game that blends elements of deck-building, sliding puzzles, and party games.

Developed and published by Byking Inc, it’s a colorful experience that can be played solo or multiplayer. 

For this review, I dipped in as a solo player and found a fair amount of content on offer, with plenty of characters to unlock and lots of trinkets to purchase at the shop. There’s a story about exploration and treasure-hunting woven into the experience, setting a vibrant backdrop for the core gameplay.

To make your way through Dialoop, you’ll need to complete a linear string of puzzle stages and tackle bosses, racking up points to reach the target score for each level. To get points, you’ll need to match up symbols with the game’s match-3 format.

Instead of just sliding one tile over the other to create a column, Dialoop lets you move entire columns at once, both horizontally and vertically. This adds a good layer of strategy into the gameplay loop, meaning you have to be aware of the entire playing field when you’re going for a move. 

Scoring points and using items wisely will help you stack up combos to reach the target for each level with ease. In between levels, you’ll be able to visit the store, where you can purchase new blocks, adding an element of deck-building into the mix. 

You’ll need coins to spend at the shop; these are earned by clearing levels and having moves remaining when you get to the end. The more coins you have, the more you’ll be able to score. 

While I did review this as a purely single-player experience, it’s important to highlight that there’s a multiplayer mode in Dialoop where you can battle against friends in an almost battle royale-esque style of play. The game supports up to eight players, making it a solid choice for a casual games night.

Interesting, but visually noisy

I’m a roguelike and roguelite fanatic, so I was keen to get stuck into Dialoop when I first saw its match-3 format.

The game didn’t quite land with me for a few reasons that I’ll get into in a moment, but I must praise the sliding column mechanic for its uniqueness. Having to move an entire row of blocks rather than just one at a time was interesting, particularly because they could be moved both vertically and horizontally. 

Where Dialoop lost me is in its visuals. I’m not opposed to a bright and colorful game – far from it, I’m a sucker for games like Ballionaire and Vampire Crawlers – but I found the constant flashes of rainbows, wiggling characters, and shifting blocks to be unpleasant.

This was heightened when I used the speed-up function; there’s an option to change the game speed, which is a good quality-of-life feature for roguelites and roguelikes, but it made the pulses of rainbow light feel more intense. 

I did enjoy the character models, though. There were plenty of unique characters in the game, ranging from a pufferfish shop owner to flamboyant hat-wielding explorers, and they’d clearly been crafted with attention to detail, particularly in the animated sequences. 

Movement was also a sticking point for Dialoop, at least when I tried to play it with a standard PC set-up. The game is fiddly to play with a mouse and keyboard – it prompts you to play with a controller, and I’d highly recommend doing so. 

Movements can easily stick and unstick with a mouse and keyboard, leading to easy misplays. Switching to a controller improved the experience.

Performance-wise, Dialoop ran smoothly and didn’t cause any glitches, crashes, or bugs during my time with it. The game was decently easy to get the hang of, and once I’d switched to a controller, the controls were largely intuitive. 

Overall, Dialoop -Roguelite Puzzle- is a kaleidoscopic experience that I’m sure will be a hit with a particular niche of roguelite lovers. While it had some interesting ideas and vibrant character models, the art style and movement quality ultimately hindered my overall experience with the title.

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