Golden Skull

Golden Skull is an iPhone game that I recently downloaded, and I ended up writing a short review of it at the App Store. Since I'd already written the review, and because I have a bunch of friends with iPhones and iPod Touches, I figured I'd copy it here.

Golden Skull is an average game. It's similar to Bubble Breaker and many other "match the colors" gem games, although it does include a light story element. The story would help if it were more than just a way to progress from one stage to the next; Golden Skull doesn't employ any power-up mechanics like, say, Puzzle Quest, where progressing from one battle to the next lets you gain new powers. Also, you have to start over from the beginning of the game if you fail a stage; once you reach the more difficult stages it would be very nice if you could retry them without slogging back through the simple ones to get back to where you were.

The game is moderately polished. The story screens are done in a clean style, and the graphics are generally good. The animation framerate for completing gem combos could stand to be higher, and the sound effects are very basic and get old fast. It's nice that you can select your own music, although it would have been nice if the game had had its own tunes to strengthen the theme (Toy Bot Diaries does this very well).

The only other thing to note is the fact that the game has a major exploit: gold coins, which are your goal on each stage, apparently count as combo completions. The player is not forced to collect gold coins when they drop, however, which means that as long as there is a gold coin in the stage you cannot fail. In other words, you can leave the gold coins on the board as a safety net since you cannot lose if there's one active.

The easiest way to exploit this is to collect the first four gold coins and then earn the final gold coin but not collect it. With the final gold coin on the screen you can just keep completing color combos to run up your score indefinitely. And if you happen to get to a place where there are no more valid moves left (which would normally fail the stage), you can simply collect the last gold coin to complete the stage instead of having to start over.

Maybe this situation makes keeping a few gold coins around an element of strategy, but given that there is no penalty for not collecting them and that you cannot fail with a gold coin on the board, it turns out that it really just lets you artificially inflate your score with no risk. The first stage is so easy that you can trivially keep completing combos and running up your score forever with one gold coin on the screen.

I'm still giving the game 3 stars, because it's by no means a bad game. It's a decent way to pass the time, and it's got an average level of polish, but once you've played it a few times you realize that the story doesn't add much, if anything, and you just have 10 stages. Once you beat those, you're done with the game unless you want to replay it for a better score (which feels cheapened by the exploit above).

Rating: 3/5 Stars

Buy It!