Left and Right Trigger as previously mentioned are your two ability attacks which vary greatly with each skull type. Right Bumper is tied to your quintessence which can be a wide variety of spells and abilities that vary from giant hands punching down or small slugs that attach to faces and amplify damage taken. Left Bumper is used to swap between your two current skull types on the fly and using it will unleash a unique ability depending on which skull you’re changing to. B is a dash of which you also have two available in quick succession, and Y is your main interact button. A jumps, and thankfully you have a double jump right from the start. X is your main attack which stun locks most smaller enemies. The control layout is standard for the genre. Let us get more into the way things control, which thankfully is quite well. The variety on these is impressive and I found myself experimenting constantly to push just a bit further with each run. Adding to this build variety are your items of which you can have 9. Skull types can have a left and right trigger ability which are randomly chosen from a small pool unique to each skull. My favorites so far were the prisoner from Dead Cells who had all the attacks and sound effects you’d hope for, and a fiery biker clearly inspired by Ghost Rider who uses his flame trail leaving motorcycle to smash through the games many opponents like a madman. Once you start finding Legendary and Unique skull types though things take off. This is where the game shines as it is quite slow to start and the early common and rare skull types are basic to use and a bit boring. To do this you’ll “borrow” the heads of your fellow demons each coming with a unique set of powers and attacks. The main goal to start is reaching the Demon King at the top of his castle and saving him from the “First Hero”, an incredibly powerful human. Your kingdom has been sneak-attacked by the evil humans who are using some sort of crystal to mind-control your once allies. You begin your journey as the cute little skeleton demon, Skul. How does it stand up to the big boys in the genre such as Dead Cells? Pretty darned well! The Very Powerful “Dark Paladin” Skull Getting Ahead Featuring well animated 2D pixel art, wry humor, and a wealth of different playstyles the game is now out on Game Pass for Console, PC & Cloud. Skul: The Hero Slayer is available from Steam for £15.50/$16/€13.43.Originally released back on October 21 st of 2021 by developer Southpaw Games, Skul: The Hero Slayer is a fun take on the ever-popular rogue-lite genre. I'm curious, because I enjoyed its opening minutes. If you've been playing and think it has improved in the development time since, say so in the comments. And the rewards you’re unlocking as you accrue your purple points are so incremental as to be barely noticeable, adding tiddly percentage points to your attack power or millisecond decreases of cooldowns at a time. Drawing a weak skull early on for example, or simply a skull you don’t enjoy using, effectively scuppers any given run from the outset – it feels like roguelike poison to be dealt a bad hand immediately after respawning. He enjoyed it, while finding it too reliant on RNG at the time.Īll of which is to say that in this unbalanced early access version, Skul doesn’t flow nearly as well as it could. The game has been in early access since last year, when Steve played it for our since departed Premature Evaluation column. A lot of the game seems to be about gradually unlocking upgrades and learning better crowd control to deal with the high enemy counts in each little level. You're an agile little fighter with a dash, and the ability to teleport to the position of your skull after it's thrown, but you can and will take a lot of damage while fighting high numbers of enemies simultaneously. I've been playing Hollow Knight recently, in fits and starts, and was surprised by how tanky Skul is by comparison. There are a bunch more, dished out at random between areas. You'll switch out his head for a wolf skull that let's you move quicker and cause damage while dashing, or a minotaur skull that let's you damage crowds of enemies with a ground-pound (just as the minotaur did to Theseus), or a jester skull that let's you chuck knives. Plus Skul, your character, is cute as a button. But really the heroes are human jerks and the skeletons mostly just want to be left alone. Skul is a game in which you technically play the baddies, hence the "Hero Slayer" title.
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