The Haunted Hoard: Bones of Halloween (Switch)
When you turn on Bones of Halloween for the first time, the main menu shows a good deal of promise for a first-person shooter based around surviving endless waves of enemies. The game offers five Survival Modes and four difficulties in its Challenge mode ranging from Easy to Extreme, each difficulty having five challenges to beat. However, this Halloween-themed horde shooter you’d hope to be infinitely replayable instead feels like the kind of game you can see all there is on offer in less than an hour, the many modes mostly an attempt to wring more out of a very lean gameplay base.
No matter the mode or difficulty in Bones of Halloween, you’ll always find yourself in a forest boxed in by castle walls. There are some wooden houses scattered about as well as some occasional graves and pumpkins, but this single location feels unexceptional and grows old quickly. Armed at first with a pistol, you’ll set out to shoot down the skeletons with jack-o-lanterns for heads, there being a limited but still meaningful amount of differentiation in how they’ll try to kill you. There are some standard types wielding axes or blades that need to get in close before they’ll start attacking, but the ones that aren’t just easy fodder are the ones with a ranged attack or some quirk. The exploding skeletons feel like the one with the best concept around them, as they not only signal their arrival but the fact they detonate when killed can be used to clear out groups of enemies or become a danger to you if you don’t give them proper room to blow. The fact enemy skeletons are just a little faster than you can means once they’re in close you might just have to eat a detonation on the chin, but the movement speed more negatively impacts the projectile focused pumpkin fiends.
The archers are not too big a concern once you realize you can start sidestepping and they’ll never be able to hit you, but the laser-eyed pumpkin skeletons and the electrical ones rub up against the game’s poor spawning practices. You do have a radar in the top left at all times that shows you where enemies are, but its range is limited and oftentimes the moment a monster appears on the radar, they’ll already be moving into range to start causing trouble. Laser-eyed skeletons will keep their beams trained on you until they perish and their unclear range makes it often look like they’re hitting you when they aren’t, but gunshots will cause harmed foes to briefly slow their approach, this more important for the electrical skeletons who will keep shocking you as long as you’re within a certain range. With a weak radar, enemies coming from every angle, and low default movement speed, the player will often find their chances of survival hinge more on how lucky they are with where enemies appear since there can be times you can’t do much about the more deadly skeletons only coming into view by the time they can land hits on you. There are little tricks to try and make this less likely like keeping a castle wall to your back to limit enemy spawn options, but the more unfortunate part of Bones of Halloween’s design is that most foes can be too easily countered with backwards walking and the occasional side step for archers so it almost needs the lasers and electricity to actually have a hope of harming you.
The game’s five Survival Modes are all score chasers but change other fundamental rules of the experience to be lightly different. Killing a skeleton earns you points, but gold coins also spray out of their bodies on death and these go towards purchasing weapons or ammo laying around the forest. The first annoyance with this system comes from the fact you need to perfectly target the floating guns to purchase them, and with them spinning sometimes the barrel might move out of the way of your crosshairs as you try. If you think you can just hammer the purchase button and hope it will line up you will encounter a meddlesome glitch instead where you pick up two copies of the gun, there being no benefit to doing so since swapping to a duplicate just puts your gun away but the game also limits how many weapons you can carry besides your pistol to three so it can end up making one slot basically useless. Your pistol’s infinite ammo makes it at least bearable to fight without these weapons, but machine guns, rocket launchers, and more powerful pistols all do recognizably kill the pumpkin-headed horrors a lot more easily. That extra bump the weapons provide do make them a touch satisfying to utilize, a little power trip that frees you from having to fire so many shots to take down a skeleton, but it’s best described as a brief respite from tedium that fades quickly since the ammo you get is not going to last too long.
In some modes, killing eight enemies will pause the action and present you with three Fortune Cards. These cards will provide a benefit or detriment to your current run, doing things like raising or lowering the damage you deal or receive, increasing or decreasing either side’s speed, or messing with the sizes of the pumpkin skeleton menace. The percentages given for how much impact these have can lead to some feeling like they make almost no difference, but since there’s no way to have any clue what the card will have before you pick it, it’s more like just a random small effect will occur after eight kills. You do get a tiny heal when the cards appear, this the only way you can replenish health but with your health total being represented as 100 health points and the heals only recovering 5 points, it can often feel like this benefit barely effects things too since even an electrical skeleton deals more than that. Having detriments feels like an unnecessary kick to the player when Bones of Halloween has done very little to endear itself to them. While this could have been a way to disrupt the samey flow of a round of play, instead it often feels inconsequential and the game can’t even justify varying up the opposition since there’s no guaranteed scaling in player power as the round wears on.
Bones of Halloween’s five Survival Modes are Classic Mode which includes the rules explained thus far, Arcade which removes the Fortune Cards and makes all weapons free to purchase when you find them, Hardcore Mode just bumps up the danger levels a bit more than Classic, Money Dripper makes enemies drop more gold but you lose it gradually over time, and Explosive Mode feels like the one that actually feels appreciably different since you only get to use a Rocket Launcher with infinite ammo and all your foes are explosive skeletons. While the others are light rule shifts defined more by whether or not you’ll run in to grab gold after you kill something, the explosive mode actually stands out a bit even though it is also is the easiest of the modes. The game’s general difficulty level is already heinously low though, and this remains true even of the Challenges despite them sometimes wearing the words Hard and Extreme as labels. Challenges end as soon as you complete them and the goal is to try and complete them as fast as possible to set a best time. They consist of pretty basic ideas sadly, things like reaching a certain amount of money, killing a certain amount of enemies, and finding and equipping the weapons which aren’t exactly hidden or anything. Most all of them can be completed with ease since their goals are basic and often just require playing the challenge like a normal round, but the headshot challenges actually may be the one spot where Bones of Halloween feels difficult in a legitimate way. Headshots kill pumpkin-headed skeletons more quickly, and in the final challenge of Extreme mode when there’s a good deal coming at you at once, landing the necessary 40 headshots isn’t a simple feat. Considering this is the one spot where the game feels difficult in an interesting and fair way, Bones of Halloween one the whole ends up feeling deeply unsatisfying, but even this final test can be overcome with a few basic tricks that can sap even more challenge away and ends up making it monotonous if you really do care about the best performance over personal enjoyment.
THE VERDICT: Bones of Halloween tries to shuffle around its meager offerings to give the illusion of variety but it can’t even construct its most basic elements to make the skeleton shooting serviceable. Technical issues compound weak enemy diversity that makes backpedaling too effective and most modes and challenges unengaging, and while the guns do feel a bit better off in terms of the range of designs they feature, the game doesn’t let them stand out much outside the mindless Explosive Mode’s rocket launcher focus. High scoring rounds and quick demises will mostly feel different in how long they took rather than any exciting situations or unexpected complications, Bones of Halloween a bare and bland horde shooter that will struggle to keep you for long enough to see even its paltry offerings.
And so, I give Bones of Halloween for Nintendo Switch…
A TERRIBLE rating. Bones of Halloween really doesn’t have a clue on how to disrupt a round in an interesting way. The most common shift to how a player approaches shooting down skeletons is when an explosive one is in play and that’s too easily dealt with, and the laser-firing and electrical enemies don’t really change your approach, they just have a better chance of harming you before going down. Challenge mode could have been this game’s saving grace, extra objectives like the headshot focus potentially leading to player imperiling themselves or forcing them to choose sometimes between survival tactics and goal-oriented play. Unfortunately most challenges low ball what they expect and don’t break away from standard play enough and mode concepts like Money Dripper just add small annoyances since you can often do just fine without better guns and they’re not necessarily key to a good performance. The Fortune Cards could have been the game’s saving grace but they too are too sheepish in how they inject variety into the experience. More drastic card effects could lead to exciting shifts in the battle formula or tense situations where you try to overcome a detriment, but instead they barely feel like they help when they’re positive and they’re just something to grumble about when they provide some negative change. Not every mode or challenge needed to rock the boat in a major way, but right now the game has settled too comfortably into a game style that offers very little once you understand its basics, meaning you can blitz through its challenges and find its survival modes too plain to draw you back in.
Perhaps as a full on rogue-like shooter where the Fortune Cards hold weight could spice up this horde shooter, but Bones of Halloween is incredibly hollow once you look past that deceptive main menu. It’s not like the game could be called disappointing though, it not putting much forward to hook your interest or imagination in the first place, so the game’s general lack of creativity just means it will end up put aside and forgotten like too many unexceptionally awful video games.