Skull Rogue

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in RPG Bundle, along with Aborigenus, Diabolic, Event Horizon, and Weakwood Throne.)

Skull Rogue is a Top-Down Action-RPG released on PC and Nintendo Switch in 2020. In this game, players take the role of a skeleton using a sword and bombs to fight off other skeletons in a dungeon.

Despite the word “Rogue” in the title, this game’s similarity to Roguelikes is fairly minimal – the levels you fight in are randomized, but this doesn’t greatly affect combat or progression, and equipment drops by enemies are also randomized, but this only affects stats, meaning that the core gameplay doesn’t really change.

Sadly, this means that the gameplay is pretty repetitive and dull. You’re just running around each room to try to avoid getting flanked by enemies, swinging your sword at them to wear down their health as you run backwards away from them in a circle, perhaps dispersing groups by dropping bombs. After enough waves of enemies generate, you’ll clear the room and pick through enemies’ dropped weapons and armor to see if any are better than your current equipment, and swap if they are. Then head to the next room and do it all over again.

I should note that one irritating issue is that this game doesn’t make it clear what your sword’s power level is, and you have to swap it with another weapon to see it. It would have been easy to streamline the way equipment works by simply highlighting it in green or red to indicate if the stats are higher or lower than your current stats, but instead you have to actually take your time and look at everything, adding to this game’s tedium.

When you get killed, you can spend earned in-game points to permanently boost your stats before starting again. There are only six stats you can upgrade – max health, max magic (used to power bombs), health regeneration rate, magic regeneration rate, melee reach, and explosion range of your bombs. That’s it. No power/defense upgrades, no walking speed, no attack speed, and certainly no upgrades to give players new attacks or abilities.

Over time, you’ll grind up enough to power up your stats to make yourself unstoppable, even possibly making it so your bomb covers the entire room, at which point any question of challenge becomes moot. However, even without cheesing the system in that way, this system is completely lacking anything to make the gameplay interesting.

For that matter, while this game’s pixel art 2D visuals are sufficient, there’s nothing here that’s especially interesting, nor is the soundtrack memorable in any way.

In the end, Skull Rogue may have provided a sufficient foundation for a decent game, but on its own there’s just nothing here to keep players’ interest. The gameplay is repetitive and dull, with nothing to keep players wanting to come back, and the presentation doesn’t provide any of that motivation either. This game may only cost $3, but even so you’re better off spending more to play something that’s actually fun.

tl;dr – Skull Rogue is a Top-Down Action-RPG where players take the role of a skeleton using a sword and bombs to fight off other skeletons in a dungeon. Unfortunately this game is dull and repetitive, and features a bland presentation. There’s just nothing here to hold players’ interest.

Grade: D

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