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Golden Skull is a color-matching puzzle game with a Mexican twist. The object of the game is to remove groups of gems of the same color to increase your score, and collect five golden coins to advance to the next level. The larger the group of gems, the more points you score. Eventually you’ll reach the last level to attain the Golden Skull. Along the way, a Mexican helper begs you for money, and leads you to the final prize. The game is being targeted towards those that want a simple, non-violent game to pick up and play quickly.
The main menu lets you start a new game, with 4 difficulty modes to choose from (Baby, Real, Master, and Top Guy), view your top scores, change your settings (turn sound on/off, turn intro on/off, and delete scores), and read instructions on how to play the game.
As mentioned above, you select groups of gems of the same color to remove them from play and gain points. There’s a meter at the top of the screen that fills up with the points you collect. Once it is full, a golden coin appears, and you tap it to add it to your collection. Once you’ve collected five coins, you advance to the next level. There are 10 levels overall, with the final one letting you gain the Golden Skull. The challenge of the game, and really the only real gameplay element the game has, is to try to get the largest group of gems to score the highest points.
In fact, there’s very little actual gameplay involved with the game. You absolutely cannot lose a game. I randomly tapped the screen for 5 minutes through 4 levels on the hardest difficulty, Top Guy, and couldn’t lose a game if I even tried. Like I said, the only thing to motivate you to play the game is to see if you can beat your own high scores after beating the final 10th level. Golden Skull feels more like an entertainment toy than an actual game.
In between levels, you go through little cutscenes that adds a story to the game. Although the story seems to just be tacked on. It involves you as Saeed, a kind of evil-looking guy, being bossed around by a Mexican assistant (pimp?) making you bring him gold coins, because he’s desperate, in exchange for taking you to find the Golden Skull. Most of these cutscenes involves him saying 1 of 4 different phrases, and since there are 10 levels in the game, I don’t see why 10 unique phrases couldn’t make it in. So, as a result, the cutscenes become repetitive and stupid very quickly.
To play, you simply tap on the color of gem you want to remove. If surrounding gems are the same color, they are all removed as well. When a golden coin, and eventually the Golden Skull on the final level, appear, you tap them to add to your collection. That’s all there is to the game. Anyone can pick it up and play right away. Some menu buttons are frustrating to activate, though. You press the word to make it expand, and once it is fully expand, you let go and it is selected. So if you want to pause the game, you press Menu in the lower-right corner of the screen, wait for it to expand fully, and let go to pause the game. It’s a minor unnecessary gimmick.
The visuals, for the most part are polished and easy on the eyes. Although the developer describes them as “sparkling gems” there’s no real sparkle to the gems in the game. They look dull and boring, as if they had a coat of Vaseline on them. The same can be said of the golden coins. Animation of the gems as they are removed from play look good though. The cutscenes and characters are nicely drawn, but that’s not really saying much.
Sound effects are minimal, but sounds decent for the most part. The game could become more engaging if there was a sound of the gems falling, but there isn’t any. There’s no music, but you can play your own music library while playing Golden Skull.
As it stands, Golden Skull is more of an animated toy. As a game, there’s no challenge to it, very shallow gameplay, and no real replay value. I was able to complete the game within 15 minutes on the hardest difficulty, and after that there’s no compelling reason to start the game and play again. If the game were free, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it’s not. Golden Skull needs to be in the Entertainment category in the App Store, either that or it needs to go back to the drawing board to be made into an actual game.
Tags: astraware, golden skull
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