A floating magical skull goes to war with his own headless body in this necromantic roguelike that combines Vampire Survivors-like combat with Teamfight Tactics-inspired army building

A necromancer's body betrays its own head, cutting it off and burying it underground before lumbering off to pursue immortality. Some time later, the skull rises from the earth and summons a skeletal army to take on its own headless corpse. As opening cutscenes go, it's certainly unique.

And it's pretty much all the setup I need to understand what I'm doing in Skull Horde. Gather skeleton warriors, fight weird fleshy monsters, and battle my way to my body. Simple.

The process of actually doing that basically looks like a hybrid between a roguelike in the style of Vampire Survivors, and an auto-battler like Teamfight Tactics. Progressing through the levels of a bleak dungeon, I'm floating around followed by minions who automatically attack nearby enemies. Along the way I'm hoovering up resources and upgrades, but also between floors I'm able to recruit more skeletons and organise my army.

With a wide range of unit types—from armoured warriors to ice mages to skeletal rat swarms—and various possible synergies between them, it makes for some tough choices, especially as an army can only host up to six different types at a time.

Three of the same kind of minion will also combine to make a veteran, a stronger form. Combine three veterans and you get a champion, which can unlock powerful set bonuses if they share a keyword (like Vanguard, Siege, or Horde) with two other champions in your force. But with limited choices in the shop, you're not always able to grab exactly what you want.

That's a lot to pick through, so I decide to keep things simple for my first run—a mostly Vanguard-based force of tough, tanky warriors, backed up by healing clerics and buff-dispensing bannermen. I can just outlast the enemy, right?

Well… probably not. You see, time is always of the essence in Skull Horde—the longer I spend on a floor, the more enemies spawn, and it's easy to get overwhelmed. Particularly with my endurance build, I'm forced to be as efficient and ruthless as possible.

Though I don't have direct control of my skeletons, I can command them to gather on my position, and I can cast a fury spell to enhance their combat stats for a short period. With those tools in hand, the best strategy seems to be to race between different priority targets—treasure chests, elite enemies, and other goodies—and then choose the right time to cut my losses and beeline for the portal that unlocks the next floor.

At the same time, though, my floating skull is vulnerable—if it gets hit, the damage is shared across all my minions, without taking into account their defences. That creates some interesting risk-reward choices. When is it best to charge ahead and save valuable time, and when do I need to be more cautious, hiding behind my boney pals?

In the end I lean a bit too hard on the latter side of that balance. Though they excel at keeping me alive, my cohort starts to flounder on a floor where I need to defeat a disgusting flesh tower creature to proceed. By the time I've hunted it down, I'm already up against it—and when it starts spawning its own minions at me to slow my army down, things go south fast. I am eventually overwhelmed, and flesh wins out against bone.

I'm left keen to take another shot at it, especially as that first attempt unlocked skill points that can allow me to specialise a bit more before a run. What is a little disappointing, however, is that where I should now be encouraged to try out other possible builds, I instead feel funneled into doing something similar again.

There are multiple unlockable characters, but as it stands I only have one, and his skill tree is focused on exactly what I was already doing—Vanguard units with high armour. I definitely have ideas for how I could build that more efficiently next time, but what I really want to do is spin off in some totally different direction.

I'm intrigued by the possibilities of horde builds that happily sacrifice waves of minions but compensate with buffs that trigger on death and a buffed respawn timer. Or wizards who can drop arcane debuffs on enemies, backed up by Troupe units that can enhance those effects with magical song and dance.

Not only will I feel like I'm at a disadvantage if I go down one of those paths, but the next character—the delightfully named Garg—is unlocked by getting a really high armour multiplier, which Vanguards are going to give me the best chance of doing.

At least being forced to be the tank takes me back to my old MMO guild days… and to be fair, I'm sure there is much more to explore in that archetype than just my crude sword-and-board build. I'll certainly be coming back for a few more attempts this week, anyway—I can't let the flesh win that easily, can I?

Skull Horde is available on Steam now, and currently 25% off until April 24.