Skyhill (iOS) Review

The element of surprise. This is the one aspect a title such as Skyhill should truly excel at when mixing rogue-like gameplay with zombie-survival. Each playthrough has the player starting off at the top floor of the 100-floor huge, titular hotel. The goal is simple: reach the bottom before the zombies or starvation devours the protagonist. The setup has a lot of possibilities, and to a rogue-like fan it would seem almost endless.

The problem is the level layout, which is built up by the 300-room huge stage. 100 x 3. Each floor has exactly three rooms. The middle room with the stairs, and one room at each side. The biggest problem with this is that most of the rooms are bypass-able, and the only reason to ever enter these should be to get food and then get out from there as quickly as possible if there is a zombie there. This creates an extremely linear experience.

Skyhill does instead prosper on some highly unlikely aspects. The cleverest one is the resource management. As all resources are highly limited, such as food and first aid kits, the goal is to try to use these as efficient as possible by cooking food, or creating new weapons. This is not enough, however, to give it replayability after the player has reached the exit once, as the game gives little reason to replay it.

The first couple of runs through the 100-floor hotel, though, will be fun. But it does suffer a lot from the very stale and predictable setup. It's sad to see that happen with a concept that could have done so much more to stay engaging and entertaining for much longer than it does. This is likely not for fans of rogue-likes, but for fans of horror survival only, which is too bad as the concept was right there for something that could have been a home run in both camps.