Today we are going to take a look at Skul: The Hero Slayer. This action rogue-lite 2D platformer promises all the action we have come to expect from rogue-lite platformers in a gorgeous pixelart world. Whether it can deliver on its promise is the question we will try to answer today. Skul: The Hero Slayer is available on Steam for 16 Euro and 79 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.
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Modern retro still has a lot to offer to gamers. Skul: The Hero Slayer is a perfect example of how you can still bring some fresh air into this now very overcrowded genre. Skul: The Hero Slayer puts a very unusual hero into the driving seat. You’ll get to play as an undead skeleton who has to defeat the Imperial army and save his King.
The Skeleton’s Bet
The action 2D platformer with a beautiful color palette from the indie game developer studio SouthPAW Games seemingly decided to dazzle us with the traditional concert in the rogue-lite key. Rogue-lite being the diet version of the roguelike genre for those of you who do not know that. But soon, you will realize that it doesn’t rely purely on nostalgia to get players on board. Some of the mechanics are reduced to their bare minimum and some, on the other hand, get abused to bring a surprisingly high amount of fun.
For example, compared to many other rogue-lites where procedural generation is the key to their success, here it’s playing the second fiddle in the campaign. Instead, Skul focuses on the metamorphosis of your cutesy skeleton hero. He can quickly morph into a demon firing out fireballs, then into a heroic knight with a massive sword, or even into a brutal biker who leaves his enemies with an imprint of his tires on their faces. This all is quite cool but most importantly fun as this mechanic just makes the game awesome. And it’s done in such a clever way. Depending on what skull you’re wearing – literally – not only does the look of your hero change but your playstyle as well.
Identity Change
The best part is that the game quite often pushes you towards changing your identity. The skulls will literally fall out of your enemies, be hiding in chests, or sometimes even just in hidden places. To keep things interesting some of them will appear more often than others, some could even be considered quite rare. And so the difficulty doesn’t get thrown out of the window you’ll have only two of them available in your quick slots. On top of that, after you die, the vast majority of your equipment (apart from a few unique exceptions) gets reset alongside your campaign progressions.
Let’s talk about the difficulty for a second as it has this very steep curve. After an almost arcady feeling start where you could almost just jump on enemies' heads like Mario the game rapidly adds difficulty with tons and tons of exploding enemies resulting in the game’s biggest problem. It gets really hard to understand what’s going on on the screen with every enemy going off in the glory of pyrotechnic effects.
The pixelart graphics and pretty raw gameplay mechanics target the game at older gamers who still remember games when death was waiting for you around every corner and there was no way to save your progress. But when you combine the fast gameplay with the indisputable fact that we aren’t as young as we used to be thus our reflexes aren’t as fast as they used to be you’ll often get the feeling that you just aren’t good enough.
But if you do stick with Skul, combine all your abilities, and learn the organized chaos on the screens you’ll get rewarding quick combat that is rarely found even in modern games. The sad part lies in the story. You shouldn’t expect a Shakespearean story. Instead, you’ll banal dialogues voiced by childishly looking cartoon characters. Get ready to skip over the story. At least the music is good.
Conclusion
So… in conclusion: Apart from some smaller problems Skul: The Hero Slayer comes with a promising recipe to step out of the shadows of the genre’s traditional mechanics while not becoming a completely different genre. I do wish it would have a better story structure and a lot more screen clarity. But altogether I had a lot of fun while playing Skul: The Hero Slayer and if you are looking for a pixelart rogue-lite then it’s a good choice.
So, that’s it for today guys. I hope you liked the review and if you did, please up-vote the review, follow my blog, and be sure to share it with your friends. And comment, if you have anything you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.
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