The Skylia Prophecy (Xbox Series X)

JusticeSte | June 18, 2021 | Review | No Comments

The Skylia Prophecy is a throwback to the early 90’s action RPG, with a 16 bit graphical style and frustrating level design and gameplay. Let’s have a look as to whether this little title is holds up against the other retro-esque titles of now.

The Skylia Prophecy follows your character Mirenia as she embarks on a quest for redemption, making a mistake years prior to unleash an evil power. Set in a medieval world, the game presents to you an extremely basic Metroid-Vania title with some decent looking character models and backgrounds, whilst nothing spectacular they’re all fitting to the game and it’s universe. However the flip side to this, one thing you will see a lot of is the death screen, which unfortunately looks like a really dated jpeg file terribly stretched across the screen.

Combat and gameplay side of things, we stick with a hugely basic approach. The combat is somewhat primitive with your character only able to attack in front of herself, no crouch attack or upwards directional attack, we have a similar approach to blocking attacks, where our character can’t move whilst blocking. This also suffers with an issue of having to use the block to activate explosive barrels, again without having the use of moving to block, 9/10 times I found myself losing a big chunk of health or even dying frequently.

The gameplay is your usual Metroid-Vania affair, yet set over a few towns/dungeon/wood areas. There’s some teleport areas to get you between the main hubs, and you get your objectives from taverns, you can only take 1 mission at a time, and this will usually end in a boss fight where you’ll get a new power up, nothing of note really stands out here unfortunately, the hub areas pretty much seem to be a bit of a cut and paste affair, and the same couple of sub characters appear. Stores in the game don’t usually have any different items in them, and you aren’t able to stock pile huge amounts of health/mana potions.

Audio wise, there doesn’t tend to be any stand out audio tracks, each area has it’s own music track but you tend to forget about it after it’s looped for the fifth time in a row. Unfortunately there’s not much difference in the different attack sounds for your character either, so you’ll be hearing plenty of the “huh” as you hit them 1 attack combos.

As a Budget title there’s nothing hugely wrong with The Skylia Prophecy, it’s definitely stuck on the wrong side of average. If you’ve absolutely rinsed everything else in the genre then sure give it a go, however you might just have more fun replaying something you’ve played before.