Skullgirls

‘You’ve got a lot to learn’, bellowed the announcer as I lost my very first Skullgirls fight and my character became a heap of dismembered body parts on the floor. And I knew he was right. As with any fighting game, training is essential. But this was research, not laziness or overconfidence (ahem). I did it to discover whether your average gamer could just jump into a game and win. They can’t. Skullgirls is hard. Do the training. It’s possibly one of the most efficient ways of getting your head round general fighting game basics. You’ll come away from the Skullgirls tutorial knowing about things like block stun and hit stun, cancelling, and when to block high or low. It’s simply explained and great for those who don’t know their c.lp from their j.hk.

Once that’s out of the way it’s time to get choosing. You have your standard Story, Arcade and Versus modes and you can pick one to three out of the eight available characters. Yes… eight. As fighting games go these days, eight is laughably stingy, but it’s been said that future downloadable characters will be available in the future as paid DLC. The current eight characters are all female, mostly teenagers, and pretty messed up in one way or another. For example: Filia has no memory and a demon parasite for hair, Cerebella kills for the mafia to gain a father figure’s affection, and Painwheel is an… experiment (*shudder*). They are not Skullgirls, though, they’re searching for a Skullgirl. The Skullgirls were once regular girls that tried to obtain the Skull Heart, an object so powerful it can grant a woman anything she desires, if she’s pure of heart. If her wish is deemed unworthy, she will become a Skullgirl: a powerful being of evil and destruction, and more of a bitch to beat than Street Fighter V’s Seth.

With most of the cast being so very god-damned cute and sexy, complete with extremely violent move sets, you could be forgiven for thinking that bouncy boobies and making a bloody mess are all this game is about. But underneath all the shiny packaging is a solid fighting game that has been carefully designed with tournament play in mind. Skullgirls boasts the most frames of any fighting game ever, infinite combos are detected and can be broken with a single button push, and it uses GGPO netcode to combat online lag.  Combos and special moves aren’t difficult to pull off once you’ve figured out the timing and are varied and imaginative, keeping in theme with the characters’ back stories and parasitical demons/psychotic tendencies.

On paper, Skullgirls is very impressive. Reverge labs, headed by tournament champion Mike Zaimont, combines the talents of Scott Pilgrim artist Alex Ahad and Castlevania composer Michiru Yamane. These creative and experienced minds’ input works together superbly to bring an extremely fun, challenging, gorgeous looking and sounding little arcade game that will hopefully grow in popularity and expand as a whole. Where the game lets itself down, though, is with user interface niggles, and missing options, such as an auto-block on training dummys and the lack of a move command list, which can currently only be found on the internet. But some of these things can, and will, we’re assured, be patched.