![]() ![]() Each weapon type has its own strengths and weaknesses that are dictated by their speed as well as primary and secondary attacks. We don’t know anything about our skeletal friend’s former life, but thankfully he’s more than capable of wielding a sword, daggers, hammer, and a number of other weapons to get the job done. After raising us from the grave, the wizard sends us out into the world to gather bloodstones – items that allow him to scout out our targets – and ultimately reveal the one who was responsible for our death. Your task is simple: gain power so you can hunt down the ones responsible for your death and exact revenge. In Skeletal Avenger, you play as – yep – a skeleton raised from the dead by a mysterious wizard. It’s also an incredibly fun title, and its gameplay is so strong that it almost manages to carry the other, weaker elements pretty much by itself. While its gameplay elements share many similarities with other games in the genre – Hades, specifically – the way it handles progression is actually quite unique, almost to the point where I would not necessarily call it a rogue-like, but rather a blend between a rogue-like and a straight up RPG. It’s probably not what the developers intended.At first glance, Skeletal Avenger looks extremely similar to other rogue-likes. Doing so never felt good, and it meant that we got in a pattern of repeating dungeons for cash and upgrades when we were at zero bloodstones, before feeling that we were strong enough to finally do dungeons ‘properly’, to accumulate bloodstones. In our books, it breaks a golden rule of RPGs: you should never go backwards in your progress. So, dying in a dungeon sends you backwards, as you lose the progress you made in a previous dungeon. But fail in a dungeon and Skeletal Avenger removes them from you. These represent your overall progress in Skeletal Avenger and block you from the milestone dungeons. We were less enamoured with the bloodstones. Being dumped out of a dungeon can feel fantastic, simply because you get to apply all manner of permanent upgrades. You can also find scrolls in the dungeon that represent a free upgrade. Trinkets give you a single, huge benefit per dungeon, and you can buy upgrades for your character with the gold you accumulate in the dungeon. Loot, too, is decent, with randomised benefits that make you question which to equip at a given time. Stacking on several of these feels great, as the perks synergise and cause pyrotechnics of fire, poison and lightning. ![]() Perks appear regularly, allowing you your choice of two to apply to your character. What Skeletal Avenger does get right, though, is the stuff outside of combat. So, while we love a bout of head-chucking, it comes with a long list of disclaimers. ![]() It’s a game-long game of fetch and it grows extremely old, extremely quickly. There is also a dash with the A button, which gets you out of plenty of fixes.Įven firing your head at close quarters isn’t satisfying: the head will often leapfrog behind you, meaning that you have to interrupt your combat-flow to retrieve it. There’s nowt better than stunning an enemy by chucking your noggin at them, then chaining it with some melee attacks. You get to welly enemies in a manner that suits your currently equipped weapon, so you might be attacking at speed with daggers, or at some distance with a spear. The first is your basic or ‘primary’ attack, which is melee. Bloodstones are required to access the bigger dungeons, which – once they themselves are emptied out – will give you access to a whole new region, with four to unlock in total. Your aim is to gather bloodstones, guarded by the bosses on the last floor of each dungeon. So in you go, trudging through dungeons that are three to six levels deep, on your own or in local co-op. He wafts some vague promises under your jawbone, saying that he’ll present you with the betrayer, but you have to do some killing first. A mysterious wizard has raised you from the dead, and he’s got some dungeons he’d like looting. ![]()
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