King of Skeleton

Moderate racing action

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

King of Skeleton was obviously made for promotion/advertising purposes, but compared to games of similar origin, there’s actually a decent game here.

In King of Skeleton you choose between two racers (male and female) to race down any of six courses to set record times. (Skeleton is a face-first style of luge in which only a small sled is used) The two racers you have to choose from are just mirrors of each other regarding their two stats, speed and agility. As you race down tracks you gain speed by picking up ‘King of Shave’ (the sponsor) shaving gels. Which really doesn’t make any sense at all, but whatever. I could think of much better ideas for a shaving game than trying to tie it in with skeleton. Regardless, when picking up the shaving gels you get the entertaining message of ‘LUBED!!’ so that kind of makes up for it.

The graphics are pretty nice, aside from the generic sonic-the-hedgehog-style sled path. Though to do this game properly there’s probably not many other options. Sledders and backgrounds are nicely drawn, as well as small touches here and there like the ice block that appears before each race starts. When the game starts you unlock the tracks one by one by beating the previous track in a certain time. This wasn’t really challenging until I tried the last course, which seemed nearly impossible to beat. When you beat the tracks you can also replay them to see if you can beat the Olympic records. This might be better if there was more strategy involved but unfortunately all you can do is move left and right and pick up speed boosts. Getting fast times is simply a matter of remembering where the speed boosts are and trying to collect all of them. Allowing us to use the up and down arrows to increase/decrease speed would have added some depth.

This game also features the ability to challenge a friend with your times, but I couldn’t get it to work quite right. The email with my times came through but when I went to play the game (the game is supposed to load in your friend’s times so you can see) it just reported a load error. I also noticed some sound and menu glitches in the game, with sounds/music seeming to play at the wrong time or not at all, and the menu returning you to your previous race results instead of to the title screen. All in all King of Skeleton isn’t bad, so if you can look past the out-of-place advertisements you’ll find some entertainment here.

Click here to play King of Skeleton






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