Skulls of the Shogun caught my eye whilst I was flipping through xblahh’s ‘Most Popular’ games – its crooked and beckoning finger assuring me that it would fill that craving for a turn based strategy game that I’d been suffering from.
While I was admittedly frustrated throughout the game at the lack of a traditional ‘grid’, I was able to see the advantage of such a thing, and I do appreciate the way they handled its own gridless-ness. Instead of being able to move a certain number of spaces, you’re able to move anywhere within a circle.
Though the lack of a grid threw me off a bit, it didn’t have nearly the impact as the lack of persistent characters did. You didn’t level up your army – and you didn’t get to keep whoever you saved in the previous map. Every single map you start with “level 0? characters, and you start with however many the map dictates. I really thought this was going to completely ruin it for me.
These hesitations aside, I persisted, and quite enjoyed the experience. Its a short game, only took me a couple sittings to complete. The art is cute, and the lack of persisting character makes it a much more casual-style turn based strategy.
I think the cheezily adorable script might be what I enjoyed most. They spend much of the game subbing dirty strings of words with similar sounding nonsensical phrases. For example: “Brother Trucking Bat Ashes”. I quite like this idea – the adult viewer can get a bit of a giggle at translating these insults, and I’d like to think that it encourages children to run around spewing nonsense curses.
You can pick the game up on just about anything, for about $10.
System Played On: XBox360
