Skeleton Warriors
PlayStation * Playmates

Review by Jonathan Ratcliffe
8.5

A relatively new entry to the platform/scrolling fighting genre, Skeleton Warriors busts into the category with great graphics, sound, music, and, most importantly, game play to back it up. However, it doesn't show the amount of originality that I had priorly hoped, but it doesn't suffer from any hugely noticeable drawbacks.

You control a swordsman, who fights his way through the mostly left-to-right oriented levels. The enemies are quite unique, and horrid-looking (enough to add atmosphere to the game play). In the first level they are primarily one-hit enemies - skeleton warriors and bats, but in the proceeding levels they become much tougher to defeat. Your character has many different types of sword attacks (up, forward, crouching, and jumping), each animated well enough to easily show what the character is supposed to be doing. When you destroy an enemy, they leave a power-up. If you do not collect it, the enemy will regain its power and start to attack you again. Other than this unique little concept, the game play is fairly straight-forward, simple to understand, and unfortunately, offers no surprises.

The visuals fit Skeleton Warriors well. From the start you'll notice a fabulous frame rate and nice looking cinemas between levels and as you explore through the levels, you'll quickly take a liking to the backgrounds scrolling in relativity to the foreground. This feature (especially the way in which the ground scrolls) is similar to what you would see used for the levels of a Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter game. The whole effect adds more realism to the game play, as you slash your way through the semi-short levels. The music fits the game (but is somewhat redundant if you ask me) and the sounds are sharp and crisp. Skeleton Warriors is a fair challenge too, so don't expect it to be a one-nighter.

Fans of this type of game may want to give Skeleton Warriors a try. It isn't all that bad, but it doesn't offer much in the way of inspiration or originality. Worth a look.


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