Skull Horde Review
Raise a skeleton army in Skull Horde, a roguelite auto-battler about keeping things together as chaos tears it apart.
Skull Horde. Credit: 8BitSkull
Skull Horde from 8BitSkull is a dungeon-crawling auto-battler roguelite. You’re a flying skull, a necromancer betrayed by his own body, now out for revenge.
As the skull, you wander a procedurally generated dungeon with your skeleton squad in tow. When flesh creatures, natural enemies of the bony ones, emerge, your minions will attack automatically. Survive long enough to make it to the bottom floor and kill the boss, and you beat the level. It’s easy to be overwhelmed, so you can’t just passively let your dudes attack indiscriminately. You have to know the right time to trigger your special ability, when to call the skeletons to you, and when to retreat to wait out the respawn timer for your dead troops. Every 30 seconds, the strength of new enemy spawns increases, and things can spiral quickly if you lose control. That constant pressure is what makes the loop work. You’re not just building a squad, you’re trying to keep it from falling apart.
You earn boons for the run from dead enemies or can buy them from the vendor for a bloody heart currency that’s only good during that run. Most boons also come with a negative effect, pushing you further toward a specific build direction instead of letting you stack everything. It makes those decisions more deliberate.
Skull Horde. Credit: 8BitSkull
Between each floor, you can spend your hard-earned ducats to buy new units. The real key to success, and a lot of the fun, is finding the right combination based on what the run is giving you. The level, the boons you’ve found, and your own necromancer’s abilities. There’s a large variety to choose from: melee, ranged, magic, support, each in several flavors with their own quirks. In most cases, when you buy three of one unit, they combine into an upgraded version, and three of those upgrade again. When it's working, there’s nothing quite like demolishing stuff with your horde.
There’s a ton to do. Each level has a different biome with unique enemy types, along with three difficulty levels and curse modifiers. Each necromancer skull you unlock has its own skill tree in the roguelite metaprogression. The cadence of unlocks is well-balanced, with material gains each run that aren’t enough to just blow through the game.
There are similarities to Boneraiser Minions, another necromancy-themed auto-battler I enjoyed, but the design is distinct enough. Boneraiser Minions is a fixed-arena wave survivor. You collect bones from fallen enemies and use them for upgrades while dodging in an open field, with some tower defense elements. The exploration, navigation decisions, and loot-chasing that define Skull Horde give it a fundamentally different shape, even if both games are about commanding undead, bony legions.
Skull Horde. Credit: 8BitSkull
The game’s pixel art graphics aren’t earth-shattering, but they’re good enough to keep the game fun. Legibility is strong even with a flood of skeletons and enemies. What it’s missing is punch. More particle effects and lighting would go a long way. I understand the logic of using the same color palette for all the skeletons, to clearly see where your force is, but it’s a little bland.
Skull Horde earns its keep through smart design and genuine replayability. The core loop is satisfying, the unlocks come at the right pace, and the best runs feel great as you lay waste to your enemies. If you’re into auto-battlers or roguelites, this is an easy recommendation, especially with the current Steam discount.
Skull Horde
An auto-battler that’s at its best when everything’s about to fall apart, and you somehow hold it together. Lots of skeletons.
