Skeleton Warriors (Playstation, 1996, Playmates Interactive Entertainment, Inc/Neversoft Entertainment, Inc.)

Skeleton Warriors is a 13 episode cartoon from the 90's which seemingly wasn't based on any pre existing property when it came out. Additionally, unlike many cartoons from the era with a single main goal, this series apparently resolves said conflict by killing off the main antagonist in the final episode, instead of just hoping to go on forever and thus never bothering to resolve everything.

The PS 1 game came out a year after the cartoon ended and has you control Prince Justin. Already this is a bit of a shame as the original show had three main characters, the Princess Jennifer who could fly, and Prince Joshua, who could travel through shadows. As such you're only left with the guy who'se power seems to be swinging a sword really good. Granted he can shoot projectiles from his sword as well, but these aren't that effective and you will be using quite a lot of ammo in later stages.

The game is somewhat of a platformer, though the level design is very linear and for the first half of the game there is almost no platforming to speak of......except for the completely out of nowhere minecart sequence in the first level which requires you to jump over things you can't possibly avoid the first time around, so it's mostly down to memorisation. Your character moves from left to right, smacking skeletons with his sword. After they fall apart you have to collect the crystal or other item they leave behind, otherwise they will reform in a couple of seconds and you'll have to beat them again. Now in the show, removing the heart crystal turns the skeletons back into humans but here it seems to pretty much just kill them.

The best way to defeat an enemy is to jump on top of them and keep hitting down, as you will not be hurt and can just continue to jump up and down on an enemy until they fall apart. In the beginning of the game you can just rush the enemies with your sword, but later on you pretty much have to jump ontop of the enemies to have even a chance of getting through a section, as the screen will fill up with enemies who will start shooting projectiles at you, and even though you can block hits with your sword, this won't help you from taking a bullet to the back.

It's around this point that you'll start to notice how weak your main character is. Sure, he has 100 hitpoints, but most attacks from enemies will deal 10 dammage, which escalates to 15 and 20 later on. Some of the smaller enemies only do 5 dammage, but most of them still take out at least 10 % of your health in one hit. And the problem is that almost all health pickups in the game are dropped by enemies, as there are very few pickups out in the open, and the enemies are finite, meaning they don't respawn if you kill them. This wouldn't be so bad, except the health items most enemies drop restore a whopping 1 health point. Some restore more, but again, the majority don't and not every enemy drops a health pickup either so you'll be lucky to have any health left by the end of the stage at all.

You also have to make it through several levels and a boss fight before the game fully recharges your health on it's own. These are usually not so bad if you have health, as you can brute force your way through the boss, but be warned, the bosses have a second form where they will come back together after being beat once so basically their healthbar is twice as long as it appears.

After tackling the bosses, ranging from a skeleton midget, a skeleton ape with multiple arms and a few less interesting ones, you move on to the next stage. But before you do, there is a driving bonus round you have to pass through where your character's hoverbike flies over some hilly terrain and gets shot a lot. It's really hard to even land a hit on any of the enemies, so your best bet is to fly up and just go left to right and right to left every few seconds to avoid the bullets fired in your direction. In the end, you don't even need to beat these sections as getting killed here just boots you to the next level with fully recharged health and without any lives lost in the process.

The later levels do try and mix things up a bit with stages taking place in giant tubes where you are pursued by huge spike balls, to section where you travel from the foreground to the background and back. The problem is the enemies mostly just shoot you a whole lot so these stages have you take tons of dammage unless you happen to have the homing weapon. This is one of a few extra weapons you find along the way, which give you the ability to fire off more powerfull shots from your swords but due to them taking more energy to fire, they aren't really that usefull, except for parts where you have to climb on ceilings and have a skeleton hanging on the next platform shoot you as soon as it comes into view.

It's here you will probably find out that, unlike most platformers, falling down a pit doesn't kill you, it just has you comedically bounce back up, almost to the top of the screen, while taking dammage. Now you can't really rely on this due to the very ineffective health pickups, however there is one section where it's pretty much necessary to use this to your advantage. There's an area with platforms that slowly turn about as you stand on them only to start spinning after a few seconds. Now this wouldn't normally be a problem, except this part is a series of multiple of these platforms over a gaping pit, and you need to have a running start to be able to clear the distance. Which is doable, even if a bit hard to pull off precisely due to the not very effective method of acceleration the game uses, namely the old "press a horizontal directional button twice fast". This is a very impressise way to get your character to run and you can easilly screw up and end up falling short of a jump. In the end, this doesn't matter much as this area ends with you having to make vertical leaps and I swear the first jump is way too high for you to be able to make normally.

Baron Dark and his oh-so-deadly knife. Should have brought a gun, honestly.

The final stretch of the game is a boss rush, culminating in a showdown with Baron Dark (yes the show really called him that even before he turned into a walking skeleton) who is suprisingly easy. Despite teleporting around, all he does for most of the fight is just stab upwards. Oddly enough when I started the level, he proceeded to throw screen filling energy balls that killed me pretty much instantly, but when I came back, he never did this again. I was surprised just how easy it was not to get hit once by this guy, and his second form is mostly more of the same.

It's hard to say how accurate this game is to the source material. I remember watching the show when I was a kid, and I did rewacth the first episode before this review, as it was one of only two that are readily availible. It's an okay game but the later sections are definitely tough. There is a bit of an esthetic similarity to Skull Monkeys, which is understandable I guess. Still at least here, you aren't murdering people you're supposed to be saving and who just got manipulated by the bad guy so I guess that counts for something.