Review: SKELATTACK Has Some Good Flavor, But Bad Bones

I love platforming games. I have been playing the likes of Mega Man, N++, Mario, Sonic, and Crash for a long time. The first game I really got into was Commander Keen, a MS-DOS platformer game from 20 years ago. I understand that each one is very different and requires a wide variety of skills and style. Skelattack has a fun story and cute/impressive hand drawn animation, but the fundamental “run and jump” mechanics felt terrible to play and the level design was even worse.

I’ll acknowledge that upfront. However, the level design and lack of direction make the challenging platforming difficult to justify. Again, I fully understand that maybe I just didn’t mesh well with the controls, maybe this game in particular isn’t for me, but let me point out a few pretty big level design flaws.

The major one is that the environments look really nice, but literally look like the geometry that players are supposed to interact with. From pipes underground to rocks in the air, more than once I was running and jumped to dodge an attack to just run into something that I thought was just background art. Another set of examples are the enemies. The enemies take a lot of damage, even early on, so players are meant to just dance around the enemy to kill them or stand in front and take damage while killing them. This poor pacing really ruins the flow of platforming. Along with this, there are turrets that shoot constantly, which are fine, but players can’t destroy them even though they are sitting right in front of us.

There are many other things like that in the game that are not well telegraphed to the players at all, making it more annoying than entertaining. I am all for challenging gameplay, but players have to be given a fair shot and understanding of dealing with the world. If things are being shot at me and I have to duck every few seconds down a hallway, let me slide, let me move while crouching instead of just ducking all the time. If I am supposed to jump up a wall, don’t black it by shadowy objects in the foreground. There are other things that can also mess up a lot of the pacing.

This game has a number of good qualities, but the big flaws in basic gameplay drag it down a lot. If you are a hardcore platformer fan, it might be worth checking out, but otherwise, I would find something else to play or go back and play Castlevania.