During combat, a target icon will appear between your equipment panes at the bottom center of the screen. You can see in the image below that I have a knife equipped in my left hand. The target icon that appears between these two panes can be clicked to toggle it on and off. When on, it is red and enables you to have more say over the flow of the battle by displaying a new screen when you click to attack. You can also see that the left-hand pane is lighter than the right-hand pane. This is because that is the weapon he is currently set to use. So you can have two weapons equipped at a time and quickly switch between them at any time.
That new screen (shown below) lets you choose which part of the mutant’s body you want to aim for. Depending on the type of mutant, your weapon, and your stats, the chances of hitting each body part will vary. Generally, an attack to the head will do a lot of damage but has a lower chance of actually landing the hit. This mutant is one of the first in the game, so I already have pretty high hit chances on everything except for his head. Once you’ve made up your mind, you click on one of the three images to make your choice and hope for the best! The one aspect of the combat that can be annoying is how often your character will miss at times, but that’s the random number generator for you.
As you descend slowly but surely towards the ground floor and possibly freedom, you will encounter more hideous mutants that are bigger, tougher, and more dangerous. One type has the ability to poison you. Another can deal multiple consecutive blows with some nasty combo attacks. Yet another is loaded with 120HP and does a fairly high amount of damage too. As a result, you’ll want to have healing items on hand if at all possible or go back to your suite to rest and recover some health.
But wait, wouldn’t walking back up all those stairs be really annoying? Yes, yes it would. That’s why you can use the elevators on some floors. Sometimes you will encounter a floor with a broken panel next to the elevator doors. If you have the right item, you can fix it. If you don’t, you can go back to your suite and craft said item, or you can sacrifice some hunger points to try and fix it. If successful, this floor will light up. You may notice that on many floors the elevator doors are crumpled and damaged beyond repair. You can never use the elevator on these floors, and thus, you have to use the stairs to go up or down from these floors.
You can see in the left image below that the elevator on floor 95 is broken. In the right image, I repaired it so the room is much lighter. However, the doors are crumpled, so I can’t use the elevator on this floor. Fixing this elevator was not a waste, though. Repairing each broken elevator panel allows you to jump to any elevator below that panel but above the next broken panel. So you’ll want to fix them as you find them to unlock more jump points in the elevators. You can use an elevator by clicking on it (unless the doors are crumpled) and a window will appear showing you what floors you can currently jump to. The VIP floor (where your suite is) can only be jumped to once you’ve found a VIP card. It usually turns up fairly early on in a run, though.
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As Skyhill has some heavy rogue-like elements in it, the game is not for everyone. Some people find them to get repetitive or to simply be way too hard. Skyhill’s easy mode is not what many people would call “easy.” It will still take you a number tries to beat the game, but the other difficulty levels offer quite a bit more difficulty for those who like having the game hand them their butt on a platter until they eventually return the favor! The game may not have quite as much depth as some other rogue-likes, but it’s still plenty deep. A lot of its depth comes from the strategy of how to build up your character. You will often be considering what weapons you want to eventually get when picking your strategy. Some weapons have high strength requirements, for example. Of course, if you have trouble getting the materials you need, some weapons might become unfeasible to try to get in a given run.
The game has some nice attention to detail too, as you can often see it raining in the background with a dark, ominous looking sky. As you near the ground level, you will start to see other buildings and landmarks in the background too, which is quite nice. The gameplay has a good sense of tension, since you never know what monster might be waiting for you on the next floor or in that next room. Do you take that risk, or do you heal and come back (if you don’t have any healing items on hand)? There is a perk that can allow you to see into rooms around you, though. The music sets the mood very well and helps keep you on edge and full of uncertainty. The sound effects do their job pretty well too, most notably during combat when you hear the sounds of your weapons.
Overall, Skyhill is a fun little game, and it can have quite a bit of play time if you want to beat it on all difficulty levels, get every achievement, and find all 52 documents. There are also a couple of alternate ending sequences to go for as well. It took me a few days to beat the game my first time. Some of the achievements will make the game much harder too, like the one for eating only vegan foods. Beating the game for the first time will probably take you from a handful of hours to a few days (depending on how much you play), but certainly much longer on higher difficulty levels. You can get the game on Steam for $14.99, and it is also available on Android and iOS.
All in all, Skyhill is a fun and enjoyable game (except when the random number generator is being a jerk, lol). It’s the game that asks if you can escape from the top of a skyscraper full of mutants or perish along the way.
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Review copy provided by publisher.
