Hands-On: Skulls of the Shogun
By Kyle Mann | July 11, 2011 | Previews | No comments | Share
I recently got my grubby mitts on an alpha build of Skulls of the Shogun, an upcoming strategy game slated to hit PCs and Xbox Live Arcade this year. While Haunted Temple Studios didn’t feel the version I got was quite ready to be stamped BETA, it’s impressively complete and fleshed out for being relatively early on in development. The good news is, it’s fun and engaging and should provide fans of squad-based tactics a zombie Samurai-laced slashin’ good time when it finally hits.
Skulls of the Shogun is a turn-based strategy game that designer Jake Kazdal compares to the Advance Wars series: simple in its rules, yet rife with constant opportunity-cost decisions that layer more complexity with each battle more expansive than the last. Now, I gotta admit that other than the aforementioned Advance Wars and a few other odd titles here and there (the Civilization series and Ogre Battle come to mind), I’m not big on turn-based strategies–not that I don’t enjoy them, just that I’m awful at them. However, I really appreciate the way well-done TBS’s pare gameplay down to simple logic and remove twitch from the equation handily, something Skulls does quite well.
The meat of the gameplay consists of concise tactical battles with a relatively small number of units, emphasizing small-scale strategy over brute force or by-the-numbers wars of attrition. The first few missions teach the ropes of the game: each army has a General and a handful of units, each with special abilities and downsides. The game nixes the genre’s standard hexes and grids in favor of range circles for each unit, a design decision that contributes to a more fluid feel to the game’s tactics, yet at the same time peppers the game with a degree of guesswork that TBS fans may feel a little uncomfortable with. See, in many other games, battles can be won with a chess-like sense of precision as the player is able to count out exactly how many tiles or spaces away the enemy can move or attack from before he’ll be in range. Not so in Skulls of the Shogun: instead, there is a margin for human error as the player tries to eyeball whether or not a certain unit will be in attack range on the next turn.
The controls are easy to pick up and appear to be designed with simplicity and intuitiveness at the forefront of the developers’ minds. The game only uses a few buttons and some mouse input to provide full control over your undead Samurai army, moving the challenge from wrestling with complex controls to musing over which units to target, or where to rest your spent units. The developer told DeltaGamer in our previous interview that he spent hours playing tactical games and wrote down a list of everything he didn’t like about their designs so as to avoid implementing them, and I think this commitment to greatness shows most in the game’s immediate accessibility. You won’t be poring over spreadsheets or keeping track of endless layers of micromanagement; instead, the game gently eases you into the concepts of basic resource generation and troop management and lets you get right to the action.
Presentation is unobtrusive but zany, delivered with a Saturday morning cartoon-like charm, though as an alpha build it’s lacking the layers of polish that usually come with some Beta work and spitshine. Even at this early stage, though, it’s bristling with an off-the-wall aesthetic and wit that are sure to please, augmenting the already solid turn-based play. Chortle-inducing cinematics interject themselves in between the bite-sized missions, which emphasize snappy gameplay over lengthy fretting over each minute decision–though indeed players have no time limit on their turns and can take as long as they darn well please. The big, boldly animated characters can have a downside though: when more than a few units are bunched together in the same area of the screen, it can get a little hectic trying to identify whose soldier is whose, and even tougher to get the game to perform the action you want on the correct target. There is plenty of time, though, for this to be corrected before launch.
If one living dead Samurai-controlling general is good, two are better; four is just off the chain–five of course, is right out. The multiplayer function appears to be just as well thought-out as its single-player sibling, dropping up to four players in free-for-all deathmatch or teamplay to see who’s the biggest and baddest commander of the underworld. If you have to drop out to take care of IRL needs, Skulls of the Shogun incorporates a function to save your place and allow you to continue your commanding and conquering the next time you’re able.
If you salivate at the mere mention of each new iteration of the Advance Wars franchise, you’ll want to keep a close eye on Skulls of the Shogun’s development. While there are a couple issues not uncommon to find in an alpha build, overall the game is shockingly complete, and I can’t wait to see what Haunted Temple does with a few more months in the oven. DeltaGamer will keep you updated on any Skulls of the Shogun news, and look out for our full review when the game drops later this year.
