#SKUL THE HERO SLAYER UPDATE HOW TO#

Other enemies send roots through the ground under you, causing that ground to glow briefly before you get hit with the roots. Some enemies charge up a straight-ahead shot that places a laser-thin red line on the screen as they aim before firing.

#SKUL THE HERO SLAYER UPDATE HOW TO#

The trick is to place the indicators for each attack in different places around the screen, and differentiate them from each other so the player learns how to read the screen. It helps that, like the recently released Cyber Shadow, Skul is a study in how to make enemy attacks legible and easy to make out if you’re paying attention.

Slicing and dicing my way through crowds of enemies and learning how to disrupt, block, or avoid their own attacks takes up enough brain power that it’s hard to think of anything else while playing, putting me in a welcome state of flow as the rest of the day’s worries are crowded out of my head. SouthPAW has seemingly mastered the intricate skill of designing “ game feel,” making each battle feel thick, meaty, and satisfying.

Getting a big group of baddies together in one place and slashing through them with the wolf skull is a delight. The only thing that does damage in either direction is an actual attack, which means it’s crucial to learn how to dash through enemies and their attacks, as well as how to group the enemies together and interrupt their attacks with yours. You can walk right through them, in fact, and they can walk right through you. Unlike in most platformers from the NES and SNES eras, and even most retro action games of today, the enemies in Skul: The Hero Slayer can’t hurt you. Then there’s how damn good the combat feels throughout the game. Originality by itself is an overrated trait something that has been done before but is still executed with this level of skill and care tends to feel fresh, even if you can draw a straight line from existing games to the design of Skul. But in playing Skul: The Hero Slayer, I never cared that I had seen so many of these individual ideas before, because each one is executed so well, and they work together so seamlessly. Other roguelite games offer similar ways to build out your loadout, and 2D side-scrolling games with cute, retro-styled characters mixed with modern mechanics are almost their own genre at this point. While the upgrades are all randomized, these color-coded exits give you at least some control over how you want to build up your character, even if you never know what the options will be for each potential reward. You’ll also be able to tell from the door’s design whether you’re about to take on a boss.

As in Hades, different doors at the end of each area lead to different rewards, so you can choose whether you want a new skull, more gold for the in-game shop, or an item.

SouthPAW Games advertises Skul as having “70 different playable characters,” and that claim seems honest, although I have yet to see every head myself. As if that’s not enough, the heads also cause you to do different things as you swap between them, meaning that each skulls’ attacks and weaknesses matter, as well as how they work together. It’s not just that a new head gives you new ways to attack your enemies, but that each one may also change how you move, or your ability to act defensively. You’ll want to swap between them often as you learn the ins and outs of each of the game’s areas. You can keep up to two different heads to switch between in your inventory, although there’s a cooldown that’s activated each time you swap between them. The protagonist’s head is just a skull - he is a skeleton, after all - so he can swap his own noggin out with a wide variety of other heads, each of which comes with its own array of powers, attacks, and abilities.

Skul the hero slayer update