Depending on how you look at it, tanking in MMOs is either a miserable chore or a noble calling. If you’re like us, you can’t help but see it as acting like a glorified babysitter for caffeinated DPS players. So, when we saw a game built entirely around this (often thankless) mechanic, it felt like a personal threat.
Don’t Lose Aggro captures the sheer panic of a raid wipe and tasks you solely with protecting the “squishies.” We didn’t expect to like it, but after spending the weekend with the Early Access build, we finally see what the developer is going for. It’s a game that looks sharp and plays even better.
Threat Management: You deal damage or kite enemies to hold aggro and keep them off your AI companion.
Sacrificial Strategy: You actively choose between protecting companions for their buffs, or letting them die to survive the run yourself.
Class Customization: You spend talent points and pick between three distinct tanking gear sets: Crusader, Disc, or Vice Grip.
The Shield Simulator
Welcome to a game where your only job is to serve as a human shield. We spent our runs desperately keeping angry hitboxes off our AI companions, who (currently) consist of a Healer and a Ranger.
We punched things to make them mad; we ran in circles to kite them. That’s essentially the loop, and remarkably, it never stopped being fun. There are three gear sets to cycle through: if you don’t fancy the “spin-to-win” Crusader, you can try your luck with the block-heavy Disc or the painfully slow Vice Grip.
With only ten active abilities currently available, the depth can feel a bit thin, but that doesn’t mean there’s no challenge. Hitting Charge to close a gap, then ripping a straggler off a squishy healer with a pull mechanic, requires genuine focus. In this game, positioning is the only thing that keeps you alive.
You could, of course, be a total meanie and throw your team under the bus. We didn’t like doing it, but we often found it necessary. Sacrificing a companion to save a run feels brutal, but sometimes the trade-off is worth it—or at least, that’s what we told ourselves as we watched the Ranger go down.
Solo developer Oren Koren left Rockstar North and turned down working on Grand Theft Auto VI to build this.
The game holds an 88% positive Steam rating despite documented bugs like floating enemies and fake walls.
Three rapid hotfixes dropped in the first four days, patching critical crashes and mechanics in specific maps.
The 1.0 release is planned to include simulated MMO-style chat banter from your AI companions.
The Final Pull
Don’t Lose Aggro takes a miserable chore and twists it into a frantic arcade loop.
While the content runs out fast, what’s there is genuinely fun, and the developer is ambitiously pushing out updates. We can’t wait to see how the game evolves; for six Euros, it’s a journey worth being part of.
ID Card:
- Developer: Oren Koren
- Publisher: Oren Koren
- Engine: Unity
- Platforms: PC (Steam Early Access)
- Release Date: April 15, 2026
- Genre: Single-player Action Roguelite
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