Skellboy Review

"Dressing The Skeleton"

Campaign

February 3, 2020 at 3:10am
By Jason Stettner

Skellboy is a really interesting sort of title, with a very distinct visual style to it. I thought the look of the game was excellent, but I was incredibly disappointed by the gameplay and general performance. This is a single player experience where players take on the role of Skippy, a sort of skeleton creature.

The realm of Cubold has been hit by a dark summoned evil, and well, Skippy. Anyways, you’re working through an enchanting kingdom which is largely linear with elements of a more opened style as you progress. There aren’t really any puzzles to face, and it’s mostly slashing your way through yet at the same time there really wasn’t much of a benefit in actually attacking enemies. I found it more useful to walk by as the checkpoints weren’t very plentiful and it would be annoying to tackle enemies.

It’s a bit hardcore to a degree I suppose, while not necessarily too challenging. There are some boss fights, it’s hard to tell how you’re doing in them and I faced a number of technical glitches. This was something present through the experience on the Nintendo Switch which was disappointing and it was clear the game did need additional polish.

Gameplay

This is a fairly straight forward game when it comes to combat. You get a series of weapons, and are hacking or well slashing opponents. You may also be using a slam technique with the hammer, but you get my point. You collect a variety of weapons as you play essentially. A really unique aspect of this game that I thought was great was the collection of body pieces. As you kill things you can collect pieces to change your abilities.

Disguise as a princess, gain body armor from a pumpkin suit or a combination of other things. You get the point, a stand out aspect of this experience. Another really neat aspect of the game was the visuals. They looked fantastic, were very distinct and not a style you see too often these days. They were full of depth, had grand animations to them and there was a decent variety to the environments you visited.

That aside, the performance was awful on the Nintendo Switch in every area you visited. Performance drops galore, which is disappointing and honestly caused a little bit of motion sickness feeling while playing. There were also numerous technical glitches and issues while playing. On top of that, it really was somewhat boring to play and I felt it to be unengaging.

The level design could have also been better, while neat at times the use of backtracking here felt boring as opposed to interesting. It would also be somewhat tedious to travel through in say a platforming challenge where you’d have to travel a few minutes to get to the same spot. Another mention, is with the saves that could have been more plentiful in the game.

The Conclusion

Skellboy has some really interesting mechanics, but has bad performance issues and numerous glitches on the Nintendo Switch. It does truly have some unique elements, I just wish it would run better and had some more polish to it. I think there’s something interesting here, at the same time I didn’t necessarily find this to be too thrilling.

It does have some really neat visuals to it, and an enchanting tune that carries the journey. It does a good job of switching up where you’re at, but I would have liked the level design to feature less back tracking. The spaces felt unique, at the same time it could be a pain to travel through. I didn’t feel it really enticed me to battle against enemies, with it being more rewarding to walk by most of them. I did like some aspects, but other elements really dragged this down for me.

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Skellboy Review on Nintendo Switch
Review Code Provided by Evolve PR

Rating Overall: 4.2